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This article investigates the potential effects of a single cultural means of claimsmaking - quantification - on the evolution of a social problem through time. By analyzing salient historical uses of statistics in public debates on traffic accidents in the United States, the study seeks to advance the understanding of the role played by numerical claims in the broader dynamics of problem construction and development. Specifically, key employments of numbers - particularly death rates - by early automobile clubs, the private insurance industry, safety movement, and printed media are closely dissected and interrelated to flesh out their impacts on dominant social representations of the issue. The findings include the early embedment of mishaps within a technical and privatized framework of risk management, the triumph of relativist approaches, and the establishment of acceptable or 'normal' death rates vis-à-vis techniques of fatality prediction and 'saving lives.' I argue that these applications of figures ultimately contributed to the gradual waning of the moralist and political zest that characterized much of the claimsmaking activities on the issue in the first half of the twentieth century. The argument provides one explanation of how traffic accidents can come to be defined in contemporary society as a necessary evil - a regrettable yet largely ineluctable price to pay for the benefits of the automobile. To the extent that many of these quantification effects are inadvertent and unintended, they are linked to both the In the United States, automobile accidents have been the leading cause of death and injury among those aged 1-34 since at least 1981 (CDC 2012). The economic impact of this reality is also enormous; for instance, the lifetime costs of accident-related deaths and injuries among drivers and passengers totaled $70 billion in 2005 alone (Naumann et al 2010). Though optimists point to the steadily declining rates of traffic fatalities in recent decades (e.g. Roots 2007), it would still be difficult to categorically refute that the issue constitutes a protracted and widespread troubling condition in America. Using Manis' (1974) schema for assessing the seriousness of social problems, traffic accidents will likely rank high as they exhibit what he calls 'demonstrable severity' - and are thus certainly worthy of critical academic attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]