> I'm saying that the safety of suburbs is overstated due to the higher number of vehicle miles travelled.

Let's see..

Representing city: traffic fatalities in San Francisco in 2021: 30 [0]

Representing suburbia: traffic fatalities in Palo Alto in 2020: 4 [1]

(On a quick search I didn't find stats for exact same year, but these are pretty close for a sense of scale.)

[0] https://www.sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fata...

[1] https://www.city-data.com/accidents/acc-Palo-Alto-California...

San Francisco population: 808,437 as of 2020 (Wikipedia)

Palo Alto population: 68,572 as of 2020 (Wikipedia)

Traffic fatalities per capita in San Francisco in 2021: 3.7 / 100,000

Traffic fatalities per capita in Palo Alto in 2020: 5.8 / 100,000

Also, 2020 and 2021 aren't comparable due to the pandemic. Traffic fatalities in the United States increased 10 percent from 2020 to 2021 [0].

[0] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...