But people get mad if I say their tomato pie is just a type of pizza

Sure, but shuttle also rhymes with muddle in my East coast US accent, at least in normal conversation. I can force myself to slow down and really enunciate the T, but even then the difference is easy to miss.

Subtle is spelled weird, but rhymes with muddle. Do you also pronounce “mad” and “mud” the same way? With my accent they have the same first vowel sounds as saddle and subtle

The crash in DC is the big one and accounts for about 2/3 of the 2025 numbers. Incidents like that don’t happen every year and will skew this somewhat.

That said, removing that outlier still leaves us with enough fatalities in 2 months to reach our yearly average. I think many of them are still being investigated, so it’s hard to say for sure what would cause this increase.