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Comment by thallium205 | Hacker News Reader

Germany is barely the size of New Mexico. Talk about an apples to orange comparison…

Broken down by state, I’m sure there are states that are safer than Germany.

Classic American answer to everything. What does size have to do with anything? Besides well understood economies of scale which clearly would favor the US?

Because when you live in a country as large as the United States, you are on the road a lot more so your chances of dying on the road go up. The quoted statistic is not per unit of distance it’s just per 100,000 people so it’s biased towards places that are smaller.

> Broken down by state, I’m sure there are states that are safer than Germany

Based on fatalities per 100k persons (not a great statistic but the one quoted in this thread), and 2022 data, then nope. Every single state is worse than Germany.

Even District of Columbia - basically a city with much less reason to drive - manages a worse score than Germany as a whole.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

Pretty ridiculous to not measure deaths per some unit of distance traveled.

Eh, you really want per unit of economic productivity or similar, since driving is not in and of itself productive. For instance, you could get the numbers to look better simply by having people circle the block in their neighborhood (presumably a very safe form of driving).

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