Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.
... The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.
More Than Just Bikes has a great video on how US automakers pushed the sale of gigantic trucks onto American consumers and how it's caused a huge increase in vehicle related deaths.
tl;dw Trade wars and efficiency standards caused work trucks to be one of the few vehicles US automakers could make without needing to follow standards or have foreign competition. Automakers were incentivized to sell big inefficient trucks and SUVs to the average person and began to heavily market them as manly/cool/safe. What was once a niche vehicle is now 80% of US auto sales.
Here in Portland it was because police stopped enforcing traffic offenses.
Largely it was the Portland cops being petulant babies. Oh, we want oversight? Decrease your increase in funding?
Well, no more traffic enforcement, among other things. Speeding, expired tags, no plates, stolen cars, everything just went nuts.
Still hasn't really recovered.
Since COVID, people really seemed to have stopped giving a fuck. I live in an urban/barely suburban area that is well lit and people drive around with their high beams on constantly now. They also sit through green lights playing on their phones. Fucking infuriating.
- Speed limits are up.
- Cars are larger and heavier.
- People who can barely drive are given licenses.
- People aren’t retested every seven to ten years to check their cognition and ability, or familiarity with newer regulations like flashing yellow arrows and traffic circles.
- Traffic laws are barely enforced in many areas.
- Many states are getting rid of car inspections, so pieces of automobiles are flying into the road.
- There are far more semi trucks on the road, and many are less regulated with more inexperienced drivers, lack of inspection, and frequently resurfaced tires.
People are also trained to just do what everyone else is doing, and everyone is driving like an asshole... so if you're not driving like an asshole, you're the one who's driving dangerously.
Screens. I'm the hand, on the dash, next to the street.
Probably only about 10% of the problem, and not a great explanation for why fatality rates jumped well after smartphones were widely adopted.
How do you figure? I remember reading somewhere that using a phone while driving is worse than driving drunk, and I see people using their phones on the freeway, every day.
I could see the delay being caused by the rise of ubiquitous social media or something. For the first few years, there just weren't as many reasons to be checking your phone in the car. And there's the intersection of distracted driving with bigger vehicles.
WTF? Seatbelt use is down?? I'd be really curious to see a Venn diagram plotting anti-maskers with the mind-numbingly stupid people who would voluntarily choose not to wear a seatbelt in the face of decades of science and societal pressure.
Seriously, hearing that seatbelt use it down to me is as shocking as when I was watching "Anchorman" and they were walking in the park and just dropped all their trash on the ground. Except that movie was parodying the way people used to think in the 70's. This is real life.
Darwinism at work.
Per the article:
Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers.
Federal stats show that seatbelt use dropped a little in 2020 and 2021 as compared with previous years, and then came back up in 2022, with a huge jump in seatbelt-non-use contributing to fatalities in 2020
More recent data isn't available yet.
There was a companion The Daily episode about this, and I think it was one of their best in a while.
The Daily: Why Are So Many More Pedestrians Dying in the U.S.?
Episode webpage: https://www.nytimes.com/the-daily
Yeah, this was really interesting. The big revelation is that in Europe, the vast majority of cars (80+% or something) are standard transmission, whereas in the US the vast majority (95+%) are automatic.
And the thing is...you can't use your cellphone while you're driving a manual.
Combine that with the relatively gigantic cars & trucks that Americans prefer, and you get a long way to explaining the huge gap in relative fatalities.
Of course...that doesn't explain why fatalities are more than twice as high in the US as in Canada (where automatic transmissions & trucks are similarly popular)