> In the EU it's half that.
I'd like to see a source on that. I think the average American drives about 30% more.
https://www.adac.de/_mmm/pdf/fi_nutzen_pkw-verkehrs_europa_f...
The US figure is around 22,000km per person for 2017.
In Sweden for example it's closer to 12,000km per person.
There's a dramatic gulf between the distance driven in the US and most everywhere else.
The passenger vehicles per capita are also reasonably over twice that in the US as in the EU (driving is far more distributed and common per capita). Around 263m passenger vehicles in the US, and 250m in the EU, with the EU having ~743 million people.
If you double or nearly double the distance driven per year, and significantly increase the share of the population that drives, it's not far off to expect a doubling of fatalities vs what you see in the whole of the EU. In fact, I might expect worse than that, as if you're pulling so many km driving, you're probably likely to be driving more often under increased stress and inclimate weather circumstances, driving at times when you perhaps should not be etc. (due to no alternatives). The risk of a bad driving outcome likely accelerates with such substantial increases in km per capita. If you take the US figure on up to 50,000km per capita, I would expect to see an even greater acceleration of fatalities per capita.
There are many, many variables which complicate the study of traffic safety and my hat is off to any traffic engineers able to deliver meaningful results. It does happen, but it's far more complicated than tracking per capita miles driven (not that you were making this specific argument, just pointing out the obvious).
x2. A drunk driver going off a cliff is uninteresting since it's a known problem with known solutions (regardless of your personal opinion on how adequate the implementation of those solutions is).
Stuff where no party did much that was unreasonable is what's interesting because those tell you what edge cases cause the system to fail.