Of the 200,000+ car crashes recorded by the NYPD between September 5, 2014 and September 29, 2015, approximately 254 crashes resulted in at least one fatality. The chart below examines the top 10 contributing factors in those crashes, excluding 94 crashes which had the primary contributing factor marked as "Unspecified." For this time period, the disregard of traffic controls and driver inattention were the biggest contributing factors in fatal crashes.
Sources: NYPD Motor Vehicle Collision Data, GeoJSON