I recently looked up some data in response to a sad person thinking that "our streets" (the writer was writing from New York, but the perception is widespread) are less safe for kids than they were in her time. As long as I was doing the research I thought I should post it here too. TL;DR: The streets are safer than ever.
There’s more relative deaths due to accident and homicide than due to illness, but that’s because childhood deaths due to illnesses have plummeted. So that means a parent was right to be much more worried about kids dying from measles than guns in the early last century. But the risk is down for all causes, so today a parent ought to be much less worried overall, AND less worried about each individual cause.
“For children older than 1 year of age, the overall decline in mortality during the 20th century has been spectacular. In 1900, more than 3 in 100 children died between their first and 20th birthday; today, less than 2 in 1000 die. At the beginning of the 20th century, the leading causes of child mortality were infectious diseases, including diarrheal diseases, diphtheria, measles, pneumonia and influenza, scarlet fever, tuberculosis, typhoid and paratyphoid fevers, and whooping cough. Between 1900 and 1998, the percentage of child deaths attributable to infectious diseases declined from 61.6% to 2%. Accidents accounted for 6.3% of child deaths in 1900, but 43.9% in 1998. Between 1900 and 1998, the death rate from accidents, now usually called unintentional injuries, declined two-thirds, from 47.5 to 15.9 deaths per 100 000.” from Pediatrics journal
The CDC data shows that death by accidental injury is several times higher than death by homicide, for ALL age groups, even for 15-24 year olds. Accidental injury is mostly vehicular, so I tend to ask people if they drive on the freeway if they are worried about their kids playing outside or going trick-or-treating.
And in case one is worried about city streets, the drop in risk can't be attributed only to the suburbs and the country. Living in the city is now less dangerous. This article is about town vs country but also talks about overall safety in cities going way up. I looked up data for New York county, the densest county in NY State, compared to other NY counties using CDC Wonder, and found that New York county had 22 deaths per year per 100,000 between the ages of 1 and 19. That's much closer to the lowest county, Westchester with 17 per 100,000, than to the highest, Sullivan county with 38.6 per 100,000.