It feels like my fellow drivers simply don't care about the human life that surrounds them. They'd rather text their friends than pay attention to the several-thousand-pound machine they are operating. In my opinion, obtaining and keeping a driver's license is just far too easy in the U.S., but I guess there is no hope to fix things on this end for two reasons: (1) losing your privilege to drive a car is a "death sentence"... how will you get to work and pay the bills?, and (2) police departments are facing budget cuts, so enforcement probably will not increase.
We have hope that self-driving cars will remove these negligent/distracted drivers from the road, but at the end of the day, what does that say about people that they can't take operating a heavy machine responsibly? Do we have any future tech that would emerge where ordinary people can threaten each other's lives?
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Also, road design in the U.S. appears to care more about throughput than safety. Traffic circles are far safer, but they aren't used enough. Anecdotally, near my hometown there is a 6-lane road intersecting an 8-lane (!) road. That is the most dangerous intersection in the town, and IIRC the county! It's no wonder why having so many lanes of cars hurling themselves through an intersection is dangerous, so why are people allowed to design these roads in the first place?
I would assume the opposite. Speeding tickets are a way for cash-strapped police departments to raise money (or justify their ROI to whomever controls the budget).
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/opinion/america-is-now-an...
US has an extremely different driving culture than Europe. ~13500miles/year for the US; ~8000miles/year for Europe. ~800 cars per 1000 people in the US; ~550-600 per 1000 in Europe.
Also, a larger number of people in the US simply couldn't live life without a car. I'm sitting in my hometown, a mere hour drive away from the largest city in the US, and I'd have to walk 45min to the nearest food. Work would be a 10 mile bike ride each way. This is New Jersey, the most densely populated state in the US.
The seatbelt thing is just us being dumb though.
It naturally scales up and down to match the amount of driving that happens in different countries.
I'm only deeply familiar with the US and UK, but the contrast there is pretty stark. I routinely see people on their phones or driving drunk in the US. Those do happen in the UK but they're a lot rarer.