Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The same is true for its murder rate.
One factor consistent with that both numbers are inversely correlated with availability (in that prompt is important) and quality of medical treatment. The US also has an unusual medical system.
I have no idea how to verify it, but it is a plausible explanation IMO. At least as plausible as other explanations (or possibly in tandem with other factors).
I’ve been seeing this a lot more recently. It seems like inconsideracy on the road is at a high. Could be due to lack of enforcement but just about every time I get on a highway, there’s someone speeding and swerving in and out of lanes.
I've been driving for 40 years. Drivers today are way less considerate than when I started driving.
It's not speed- people have always driven fast, and teenage boys have always driven recklessly. It's a complete lack of courtesy. For example, you can be 3/4 of the way out of a perpendicular parking space and there's still an excellent chance that someone turning into the aisle will cut you off. It's common that if you're right-turning onto a street, and there is a red light on the street with traffic stopped nearly to where you are, that through traffic will ignore you and block your intersection rather than "give up" a car length to let you turn in. People in the right lane on interstates don't bother to change to the center lane when approaching an on-ramp. People in stop-and-go traffic won't let traffic merge in from on-ramps.
I don't know what caused this or what to do about it.
Could it be "Work From Home"?
A lot of what would be middle aged professionals probably now work from home. Pulling a big cohort of what insurance companies conssider to be quite safe drivers out of the traffic flow both decreases the absolute number of control rod-like safe drivers and increases the percentage of poor drivers on the road.
I'm sort of dead on in that cohort, and I make an absolute point to not be on the road during any traffic spike times.
The "steel bubble" comment here is so important. The design of American (and Canadian!) cities and towns being reliant on automobiles for everything is fundamentally socially distancing. If you were going for a walk you wouldn't be frustrated and an asshole to other walkers because they're right there next to you and it would be incredibly impolite. In a car it's distancing, and so people in those other cars become non-persons, cars, not persons, and so one has free reign to not treat those car drivers as who they really are, your neighbours that live in your town along with you.
> In a report published in November, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a nonprofit, concluded that S.U.V.s or vans with a hood height greater than 40 inches — standard-issue specs for an American truck in 2023 — are 45 percent more likely to kill pedestrians than smaller cars.
I'm sure that's not particularly representative (actually I think it might have been a covid thing?) but the fact that it was even conceivable, and that few of the Americans in the comments seemed to fully understand how genuinely pants on head insane the situation being shown was, really stuck with me. Felt almost like a comic from an alien planet rather than a civilised foreign country.
1/4th the population of the US and yet only 1/14th the number of deaths on the road.
Deaths on the highways in Germany amount to 270 people or so. In the US it's something like 5000.
Speed kills?
You're comparing total numbers of deaths while traveling on highways, which means you need to also compare total passenger miles traveled on highways. Using per capita is utterly absurd. I'm not saying that you're automatically wrong, but your current argument statement is incoherent.
AND ALSO, 40% of the autobahn has speed limits, trucks are always limited, and advisory limits apply everywhere according to https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/life/germany-and-the-aut...
The link also says "In practice, this means that there are only a few stretches of road where you can really drive at unlimited speeds during the day."
AND ALSO, speed limits aside, what's the actual average traveling speed difference between the two countries for passenger vehicles? The same link says the average in Germany is about 78mph. Ask someone living in the US if that's significantly faster than here.
Interestingly, the same report shows a reduction of 12.1% in total road deaths between 2010 and 2016, while the US had an increase of 13.5% over the same period.
I'm scared to even list the US's increase pedestrian deaths caused by drivers. No regard for human life at all.
Source: https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/irtad-road...
Absent some indication that the two countries put the same number of people in each vehicle on average, it needs to be passenger miles, not vehicle miles, and for the purposes of this particular thread, it needs to be specifically highway miles and then probably further clustered by speed.
Because the parent comment's statement was some potshot "autobahn go fast" snark about highway speed limits. We all know (I hope) that a huge percentage of vehicle incidents happen at intersections and on country roads, which the US has more of by virtue of its geographic spread and which are not designed particularly safely here. And we all (I hope) know that americans behave antisocially and are bad at implementing long-term plans that would improve society for everyone. Those are rightly given.
On a recent 750+ mile each way road trip, I averaged 70 mph on a door-to-door wall-clock basis (start the timer, drive 750 miles, stop the timer, divide). That was with three short stops one way and two on the way back, and we got passed by almost no one.
That's significantly higher than average speed on highways in western Washington. The nominal speed limit is 60 and average speed is about 70 mph. Once you get east into the mountains where the limit goes up to 70, the average rises as well (during good conditions, anyway). Many more people drive around the western side of the state than on that rural section of I-90, though.
The difference must lie with the things that we know are systemically different between the United States and Europe and Canada and other places. We know that the infrastructure is worse, we know that there are less transportation options, we know that the cars are bigger and heavier. It's these differences between the United States and other places that is the core of the problem.
If the problem was that the pandemic made people a bit batty, well it's the infrastructure and cars that made things worse in the United States but not as significant of a problem in other jurisdictions.
Good news is that systemic infrastructure problems are fixable. This quote about France shows that things can be fixed:
A country like France is proof. In 2003, the French government began installing a network of speed cameras on its roads and ratcheted up fines. As a result, rates of speeding steadily dropped in the first decade of implementation, as did the number of severe injuries and fatalities.
I feel like this quote should be appealing to the engineering oriented folks that read this site:
“A good systems design has to account for people making mistakes and prevent those mistakes from being lethal,” he said.
The core problems America has is that the terrible infrastructure has made it incredibly easy to make mistakes, and as cars have become bigger and heavier the cost of those mistakes is getting worse and worse.
If the pandemic is at all at fault is that the stress from it was exacerbated by the terribleness of the restrictive automobile oriented infrastructure in the United States which in so many places is the only option.
Maybe people just started driving the actual design speed of the road when they were empty during covid. Like the speed limit is 40 but people feel comfortable going. 60 because American roads are wide, straight, and unobstructed. Then a pedestrian steps out in front of them and their 3 ton pickup crushes them. The problem isn’t like internalized trauma, its the fact that American traffic engineers design for vehicle throughout and speed and nothing else.
Even after dark when the vehicles lights are (usually) on, it takes a couple of seconds to decide whether to wait or cross to the median, for a second period of observing. I'm not disabled (or a child), but even so I have to wonder what/if these drivers are thinking/using. I also wonder why there's no technology to photograph, record, analyze and report these severely dangerous violations.
Why do you think the average driver in America thinks it is ok to speed with general/complete disregard to others?
My personal opinion: they are not concerned about the safety of others, they are concerned about themselves/their family/their friends/their social circle only.
It's a greed thing. Greed with time.
If I speed, I can get to where I want to go faster and not waste my time being safe/waiting for others. Therefore, I can do more things that I want to do with the people that I want to do them with instead of "wasting it" being careful + slow in traffic.
I'd say that's the main reason why people are greedy/selfless/dangerous in traffic in America.
Another factor is that not everyone is supposed to drive, eyesight or other health (also mental) issues prevent some people from driving, but in the US everyone has to drive to live so those people drive as well even if they know that they shouldn't.
In my 2-3 weeks trip in the USA I saw a glimpse of this, very car centric culture but the culture is only about the machines not about the actual driving. People there only know how to drive in ideal conditions, in their wide lanes, gigantic parking lots etc.
0. The obvious answer first off: cell phone usage while driving.
1. We treat driving as a right rather than a privilege, partially because our car-centric infrastructure makes driving essentially a necessity. And so people legit argue in favor of being soft on DUI's because being hard on DUI's can ruin someone's life because they might be unable to get to work, meanwhile they say nothing of the lives ruined when they hit someone.
2. America's culture of rugged individualism leads to selfish attitudes, which on the road means acting like you own the road and everyone else is just in your way.
3. Overall leniency on crashes. If someone crashes into someone because they ran a red light, they usually only get a ticket for running a red light unless they killed someone, in which case they'll get charged with vehicular manslaughter. But no, that crash needs to come with charges for property damage. If there are any injuries require medical attention, they should come with charges of vehicular assault. In short, being at fault for a crash needs to be PUNISHED.
4. Lack of driver's ed. PARENTS SHOULD NOT BE THE ONES TO TEACH HOW TO DRIVE. By not having a standard curriculum, there are often gaps in driving knowledge, or even worse, myths passed down. For example, a buddy of mine was told specifically by his mom to just stay in the left lane if his exit isn't coming up, when the reality is that you should be keeping right except when passing. Also, driver's ed needs to include practicing emergency maneuvers, especially on wet pavement. (EDIT: One thing that would be nice to have is make students complete an obstacle avoidance course in both a large SUV and a small sedan. I imagine we might change minds on what type of vehicle is safest if more people were able to get an appreciation for the agility of a smaller car and learn how to avoid a crash entirely rather than thinking they need to get a 2025 Chevy Movie Theater to be safe, but alas, this would likely make driver's ed way too expensive)
It seems like people just accept crashes as part of life and act careless on the road, rather than treating driving for what it is: Operating a 3000+ piece of metal, frequently at high speeds.
I watch a LOT of dash cam videos on YouTube, and I'm rather passionate about this topic. It's utterly ridiculous how completely careless some drivers are. Changing lanes without looking, making right turns from the left lane, making sudden U-turns from the right lane, following too close, blowing through stop signs and red lights, entering roundabouts when there's oncoming traffic, turning left on an unprotected green when there's oncoming traffic, parking your car in the middle lane of the interstate to change a tire, I could go on and on and on...
And I know someone is going to read some of the things above and say that suspending/revoking licenses won't stop people from driving...and my opinion is that driving on a suspended/revoked license needs a jail sentence. If the state has deemed that you are too poor of a driver to be allowed to drive, but you choose to drive anyways, then you're a menace to society and need to be kept out of society for a bit.
Find a double decker bus (if you work at a tech company some big silicon valley tech busses are double decker) and sit in one for a drive, and look down into the cabins of people's cars. I'd say a good 30-50% of them are on their phone. We don't treat scrolling-while-driving as a serious crime and as a result everyone is totally distracted.
I would say we should treat it like drunk driving, but the USA also doesn't treat drunk driving very seriously (you can have multiple DUIs!!) either so that's not a good standard.
You should really lose your license for a few years if you are caught scrolling instagram while driving.
I've heard similar things from semi-truck drivers. People barreling down the Interstate at 70+ mph, eyes looking at their phone as they shift left and right in their lane.
> We don't treat scrolling-while-driving as a serious crime and as a result everyone is totally distracted.
We really don't.
Statistically, young men are shown to be the riskiest drivers so this should definitely have a positive impact on the safety of our roads.
Anecdotally I have also noticed an increase in driving aggressiveness there over the last couple of years (mainly, how aggressive passing behavior is on two-lane undivided roads that are prevalent there).
Drivers here are notoriously unaware of their surroundings, often have no concept of who has right of way, largely seem oblivious to the concept of a blind spot, and in general just ignore any road rules that are inconvenient to them.
- "why are you stopping here?" (At a red light)
- "why is he turning his head can't he see the mirrors?"
- "what are they honking at me for, what's your hurry?" (After pulling out and cutting off traffic
All things my mother in law said while driving or when I/my wife was driving her somewhere.... and she actually has a licence. Now think about all the people here who don't have one or paid someone to take the test for them.
https://dnyuz.com/2024/01/10/why-are-american-drivers-so-dea...
On the other side of driving are millions of drivers now have to spend their trips surrounded by moving walls that reduce visibility to fog-like levels. Being able to predict traffic by seeing far ahead is increasingly impossible - and this reduces reaction time from 10 or 20 seconds to less than 2.
An aggressive driver is an issue that moves on from me. Visibility killers don't. They dominate most every trip, continually making everyone else less safe.
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