Looks like they're still the leading cause of dead kids,

> While gun and motor vehicle deaths increased substantially in 2020, the latest year for which final numbers were available, claims that more children and teenagers die due to guns than motor vehicles only hold up when 18- to 19-year-olds are included, a group that accounts for nearly as many gun deaths as 1- to 17-year-olds combined do, according to an NBC News analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The gap between vehicular deaths and firearm deaths is narrowing among 1- to 17-year-olds, and may close entirely, according to the CDC’s provisional and incomplete 2021 data.

from https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/child-gun-deaths-car-d...

I'm not sure the word "kid" is legally defined anywhere, but for minors, it would appear that automobiles still are the leading cause of death

(or at least they were as of the time of that report, and from a quick search I'm not finding any more recent analyses. Traffic fatalities increased by a notably higher rate than homicide in 2021, and homicide decreased notably more than traffic fatalities in 2022. Would need to analyze the CDC's data to verify if the overall trends are present for minors too, but my guess is that they probably are.)

Not that which is #1 has much impact on resolving either of these issues, as cars were unquestionably the largest killer of kids for many years with politicians and even the general public seemingly unconcerned. The U.S. has an extraordinarily high traffic-fatality rate compared to other developed nations (higher than any other developed country in the world per capita [1]), with it being a leading cause of death in the U.S. for people ages 1–54 [2]. The U.S. has over 2x more traffic-related fatalities per 100k people than Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Greece, South Korea, Italy, Australia and France, over 3x more than Portugal, Germany, and the Netherlands, over 5x more than the UK, over 6x more than Spain, Japan and Sweden, and over 12x more than Norway. In other words, of the 42,915 people who died in motor vehicle fatalities in 2021 in the U.S., the overwhelming majority of them died unnecessarily.

The solutions aren't a mystery: passenger rail has exceedingly few passenger deaths, and rarely ever causes pedestrian deaths. More walkable and bikeable cities would also help as well, as obviously not every street is going to have rail on it. In the meantime, lower speed limits, enforced both by law and by design of the road, as well as lighter vehicles, would also help mitigate the issue.

Some say it's an unfeasible pipe dream to have good public transit and walkable cities in a country as geographically large and spread out as the US, but the US had excellent public transit and walkable cities 80-100 years ago. Many small towns from that time period had significantly better public transit and walkability than many major cities do today. One of my relatives grew up in a town of 25,000 people and her family had no car growing up, so she walked nearly every place she went. She tried saving up for a bike, but every time she could almost afford it, the price went up, so eventually she gave up and used the money she was saving to take a trip to New Orleans. Her town of 25k back then was more walkable than Columbus, Ohio — a city of 900k people — is today (it also had passenger rail, which Columbus does not have at all anymore, and has no plans of bringing back.)

I don't know what it is that makes people so insensitive to car deaths. I have a relative who lost her husband due to a car crash, and she herself suffered permanent injuries from being hit by a car as a pedestrian, but despite all of that when I talk to her the thing she always seems worried about is the crime and violence she hears on the news, despite the fact that you're far more likely to die in a car crash. I hear people complain about violence all the time (rightfully so, it's inexcusable) but I don't know that I've ever heard someone say they're worried about car crashes, despite being a far greater danger. I think people just think it's a natural part of life that is unpreventable, when it is neither natural nor unpreventable.

1. https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/71/wr/pdfs/mm7126a1-H.pdf
2. https://www.cdc.gov/injury/features/global-road-safety/index...
3. https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/irtad-road...