Missing from your response is that there are both risks FROM and risks TO. We absolutely need to blame dangerous drivers for failing to prioritize the second category.
Driving has become far too casual, too "just a thing you do." People don't respect it anymore. I'm a car guy and I see it every day, people rolling around in cheap, crappy cars who have no respect and no interest in driving; driving is the thing they have to do to get to the thing they actually want/need to do. That's it to them. Because of that they see it as something that needs to be tolerated, an accepted nuisance, and because of that, they purposely distract themselves, try and pass the time. Make this boring, arduous task go quicker so they can get their shit done and move on to more interesting things.
It doesn't matter how good you are or not behind the wheel; if you just don't care, you're a fucking danger to everyone around you. That's something not nearly enough people appreciate anymore.
Edit: Tucking fypo.
I enjoy driving, and should mention that in some ways the most fun I ever had was in a $500 1990 Nissan Sentra. Plenty of people in fancy cars dgaf about the act of driving, and plenty of folks in cheap cars (especially ones where keeping them running these days is a labor of love) care more than you might think.
Maybe it's a socio-economic thing. Maybe they're stressed out from working low-paying jobs. I dunno. This is my experience and I know it isn't scientific data.
And to be clear, when I say I'm a car guy, what I mean is I enjoy both cars and the act of driving. Not to toot my own horn here but I'm going on 12 years of driving with nothing beyond a speeding ticket.
Edit: As an aside, I don't drive a particularly expensive car either so I'm not snobbing here. Most of the time I'm in my F-150 which is a little posh I suppose but hardly the most expensive thing on the road most of the time.
What you just said is that you're OK with reckless endangerment and not OK with inconvenience. I would ask you to please reconsider your feelings here.
I'd be happier still if we could not have people who go too slow or too fast, but failing that and given the choice between, if fast people are left to their business to cruise at whatever speed in the left lane, unobstructed by slow drivers, everyone is demonstrably safer. But because people conflate moving slowly with moving safely, it's considered taboo to say that out loud.
This is a false dichotomy. There is in fact a third, safer alternative when driving already at the speed limit, which is not passing at all. Again you've chosen to prioritize convenience (speeding) over safety.
It very much is unsafe.
In some studies they find that speeding does not cause more accidents.
But speeding is still unsafe because speeding makes the accidents that do happen much more likely to be fatal.
Police in many cases use driving enforcement as a means of raising money, rather than reducing risk. Much of the infrastructure is designed to make driving easier and faster. We as a society need to make it unacceptable to drive at all dangerously, and introduce better alternatives (buses, rail, protected bike lanes, etc), and yes, driving needs to become less convenient in order to make other non-drivers safer on and around the roads.
Claiming that people should automatically be as concerned about being a danger to others as they are about danger to themselves is a nice thought... the world would be a good place if that was the way things worked... but it's not. Even the most educated and enlightened people put their own safety first and the threat to others second, because we're all human.
Maybe instead of attempting to find fault we should roll the dice in accordance with the speed vs lethality tables whenever a driver hits something with another person in it.
Sorry Jim, we're going to have to kill you today. The simulation says you drove right into the maw of a redwood chipper.
That's basically what it feels like using a mode of transportation that carries a high risk of death in a collision.
In this case, brutally rational... at least in a very short term sense! I of course agree with everyone here that at the conscious level, I would love to prioritize bikes, motocycles, and pedestrians. But I don't drive at the entirely conscious level, and neither does anyone else. A lot of driving occurs at much lower levels.
This is not all bad; if we were all driving at fully conscious levels, we'd all be driving like student drivers all the time. That's what "fully conscious driving" looks like. It is not a desirable thing. It would be much worse than what we have now. Nevertheless, the fact that the rest of our brain is involved means that we must also consider the negative side effects of using our lower systems, and one of those side effects is that it is going to be, by default, intrinsically focused on avoiding immediate negative effects like pain, and much, much less focused on long-term considerations like "what we did to a stranger" or "how long we'll be in court". These systems just don't have a long time preference. Heck, what we are pleased to call our "conscious" minds aren't always all that great at balancing long term considerations.
You can blame these systems all you want, but that's not going to change anything about them.
My personal cognitive hack is to try to see them as walking lawsuits, and feeding the lower parts of my brain lurid, emotion-laden images of what will happen to me and my family if I do hit one of those things out of negligence. My conscious mind really is rather worried about one moment's negligence wrecking everything. It's... better than nothing. But I'm still not really speaking the subconscious' language. It may be "subconscious" but that doesn't mean it's "stupid"... it knows I'm lying if I try to claim that I'm going to be physically hurt if I hit them.