Pic taken from roadway.report, an interactive map of all known roadway deaths in the USA.
Fatalities resulting from motor vehicle crashes are the third largest cause of accidental deaths in the United States. On average for 2024 there were over 100 deaths per day on US roads.
We should standardize on printing statistics like this in magenta superimposed on the population density printed in yellow—then per capita differences would show up as different hues (pinkish for high or orangish for low).
I think for this map to be salvaged you need to fix the denominator and not use political boundaries for aggregation. Hexagons or raster because the entire point is to make it arbitrary. The formula would need to be something like (Auto Deaths per capita)/(Road Miles Traveled Per capita), or maybe (Auto Deaths per capita)/(Sum of length of roads per cell).
Regardless, its still a population map because the denominator gets really small in rural areas, and the map still doesn’t tell us anything about how safe or dangerous roads are.