The US is an outlier compared to other developed countries for this, but comparable to poor countries.
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).
The US is also an outlier in terms of murder rate compared to poor countries. The Us homicide rate is over 6 per 100k, while Pakistan (which has plenty of guns) is under 4. But the US isn’t really one place. Idaho’s homicide rate is 2.2, while Puerto Rico’s is 19.3. Which is 5 times higher than Afghanistan. Note that Spain’s homicide rate is under 1. Puerto Rico and Spain actually have similar GDP per capita. And Puerto Rico is an island with strong gun control.
This argument is somewhat misguided. In my hometown maybe 30% of the population was immigrant, but with a good integration policy there have been no issues. In my experience, neighborhoods in the USA are much more fractured with each keeping to their own. This, in my opinion, is ultimately unhealthy
“The US is more diverse which is why we have more problems” is just an old racist talking point.
It’s such embedded racist trope that it’s hardly recognized as such - much like how the vast majority of Americans conceptualize Africa a monolithic country. [1]
What do you mean by “diversity?” If you’re talking about superficial differences, then you’re correct. China is an example of a country that has different ethnic groups, but where they’ve managed to erase most sense of distinct ethnic identity and created cultural homogeneity. So you can have an orderly society with ethnic diversity.
But the US has cultural diversity—which is different than race. Diversity that actually makes people different—culture, religion, etc.—is a source of conflict everywhere. It’s not about race. On the subcontinent, we’re all “brown.” But we made different countries for the brown Hindus versus the brown Muslims, and then we split the brown Muslims into Urdu speakers and Bangla speakers. And it’s just easier that way.
In America, even the folks we consider “white” are actually different, culturally distinct subgroups. Appalachians are different from New England WASPs who are different from Italians, and the strife and disharmony between is the reason for a lot of America’s problems. And if Massachusetts was a country by itself and didn’t have to care about what West Virginia was doing, everyone would be happier.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Name me a socially harmonious country (like say Denmark or Japan) that’s also culturally diverse. The only one I can think of is Singapore, and that’s a very unique situation where you’ve basically got a strongman keeping everyone in line and working together.
> In America, even the folks we consider “white” are actually different, culturally distinct subgroups.
But that's true of other countries too. In Glasgow, they still have problems with ethnic/religious conflict (sectarianism) between Protestant Scots and the immigrant Irish Catholic minority (many of whose ancestors immigrated in the 19th century), particularly associated with the rivalry between the Rangers and Celtics football teams–yet both sides are generally perceived as "white". In Australia, most of the Germans went to Adelaide, which is why it is still the national headquarters of the Lutheran Church. The majority of Scottish immigration to New Zealand went to the southern part of the South Island (especially Dunedin and the surrounding Otago region). Over 25% of people in Saskatchewan have German ancestry, compared to less than 2% in Quebec or Newfoundland and Labrador; nobody would be surprised to learn that over 30% of Nova Scotians have Scottish ancestry (it is in the name), but in fact the percentage in Prince Edward Island is even higher. (All these Canadian figures are from 2016, don't have figures from the 2021 Canadian census handy.) In Argentina, most of the Welsh immigrants went to Patagonia, and there are still a few thousand Welsh speakers there today.
This just seems to be another one of these "America is different because it has X" explanations which completely ignores the fact that comparable countries have X too.
Sectarian conflict exists everywhere. But in America it’s all-encompassing, because there is no dominant group. Australia is still majority English. Scotland is majority Scot, etc. America has no majority group. Only 4% of Australians have German ancestry. In America, by contrast, Germans are 17%.
I don’t think there’s any election in Australian history where people from a foreign ancestry ended up tipping the balance and caused major change. That’s happened repeatedly in America. FDR never would’ve gotten elected without Irish and Italian immigrants. That would be an explosive event in most other countries.
In the 2021 census, only 33% of Australians reported English ancestry. Of course, there are probably many Australians with English ancestry who didn't report it on the census – I know, I am one of them. But, my Irish ancestors outnumber my English ones, and I feel a certain emotional connection with Ireland which I lack with England. There's a cemetery in County Kerry where many of my Irish ancestors are buried–I've never actually been to it (one of these days), but my parents have–whereas, I know almost nothing about my English ancestors except for the fact of their existence (on my paternal grandmother's side)
The quasi-official term for Australia's historical ethnic majority is "Anglo-Celtic Australian", which incorporates all the ancestries of Britain and Ireland (English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, etc). Referring to that majority as "English" can be seen as excluding the Irish/Scottish/Welsh. On the other hand, the term has been criticised as minimising the role that British-vs-Irish/Protestant-vs-Catholic conflict has played in Australia's social and political history
> I don’t think there’s any election in Australian history where people from a foreign ancestry ended up tipping the balance and caused major change.
Irish Australians played a major role in defeating the 1916 and 1917 conscription referendums; if only English Australians had been able to vote, the referendums would have likely passed. The Ireland-born Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, played a big role in the defeat of both referendums, publicly arguing that Germany's crimes against Belgium were nothing compared to Britain's crimes crimes against Ireland. The defeat of the referendums had major political consequences – the governing Labor Party split into pro-conscription and anti-conscription factions, with the former ending up merging with the conservatives, while the rump anti-conscription Labor Party ended up locked out of government for the following decade.
> FDR never would’ve gotten elected without Irish and Italian immigrants. That would be an explosive event in most other countries.
Australia's Labor Party split again in 1954, this time over communism. The activist B. A. Santamaria (leader of the "Catholic Social Studies Movement", both his parents were Italian immigrants) claimed that Soviet agents had infiltrated Labor, and demanded they be expelled; the party rejected his allegation, and expelled his followers instead. Santamaria founded his own anti-communist "Democratic Labor Party" (DLP). Mannix, still Archbishop of Melbourne (he died in office in 1963, at the age of 99) played a pivotal role in encouraging Catholics (still majority Irish) in the state of Victoria to vote for the DLP, whose members once elected supported the conservative federal government, and helped keep it in power for the next 15+ years. Conversely, Normal Cardinal Gilroy, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney (first ever Australian-born, but both his parents were born in Ireland), opposed Santamaria's movement, and hence the DLP was unsuccessful in New South Wales.
Once again, arguments for American exceptionalism rely on ignorance of comparable events in other countries
How is it “xenophobic” to point out that foreign countries (Japan, Denmark) have better results in some respects?
Human beings are social animals. Organizing a society is easier when people have shared identities, know the same rules, have the same values, and believe in the same things. Not because of “prejudice” but because of the efficiency and value of being on the same page about stuff. And everyone on this site knows that—there’s a reason Silicon Valley companies spend so much effort cultivating a particular culture. It matters for working together to achieve shared goals. Countries are no different.
To offer an anecdotal example: my extended family is a mix of monocultures: I’m Bangladeshi, my wife’s Oregonian, and my sister in law is Taiwanese. And, even in the complete absence of prejudice, the social cohesion between these cultures is low. We spend a lot of time working through differences in expectations and values, and it’s easiest to just keep everyone at arm’s length a bit. It’s utterly different from the tightly integrated and cohesive extended family networks in my Bangladeshi side of the family. If you put us all together in a “Survivor” situation where we all had to work together and cooperate, it would not go well.
That’s basically a microcosm of America. We’ve developed this individualist, arm’s-length culture as a result of our immense cultural diversity. And one of the outcomes of that is we drive around in these big steel boxes and don’t care when we run each other over.
You’re basically saying that people should value cultural diversity as an end in itself, and pursue it makes it difficult or impossible to do things that require large-scale social organization. But why should we value what you value?
> “The US is more diverse which is why we have more problems” is just an old racist talking point.
It also ignores the degree of racial diversity of other developed Western countries. Over 17% of Australians have Asian ancestry, and if you add to that other non-European ancestries it would be over 20% of the population. And yet, Australia’s homicide rate (on a per capita basis) is less than a quarter that of the US. New Zealand is about 16% Māori, 15% Asian, 9% Pacific Islander, with almost 30% of the population having non-European ancestry - and its homicide rate is a bit higher than Australia’s but still less than a third of that of the US. Similarly, New Zealand’s road fatality rate is just over half that of the US (per capita), and Australia’s is less than half.
America is literally built on classist domination.
Like there’s no two ways about it it’s unquestionable there’s no denying it. It is embedded in our history and it is inextricable from our future.
Until and unless we fix the root problem which is the foundational inequity that America was founded on, we’ll continue to devolve and will eventually revert into a group of countries, much like all the ancient empires did.
This is probably the most directly (and hopefully most likely unconsciously) racist thing I think I’ve seen on HN.
IQ tests are widely understood to be cultural artifacts and have no globally generalizabilty. Further your population comparisons are all over the place with non-relative populations proposed as directly replacable.
I don’t even know why I’m wasting my time here with this honestly.
This is terrible statistic that are seeking validation for racist sentiments.
> 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.
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.
My guess is no enforcement. It's pretty much a free-for-all where I live and everyone seems to know it. The cops don't patrol or even sit in their favorite speed traps anymore. They don't come if you report property crime either. Honestly, I'm not sure what the police are even doing anymore.
> It seems like inconsideracy on the road is at a high.
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.
We may be zipping down the highway, trapped in our own steel bubbles, but we’re influenced by the behavior of the residents of the bubbles next to ours.
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.
> 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.
> 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 saw a comic on reddit once that the author had drawn about their driving test experience - real - showing her driving with her dad sitting in the passenger seat next to her while she navigated around some car park or test track with the examiner standing somewhere close by watching! And this was not the joke! (The joke was that her dad wasn't allowed to say anything helpful to her and the effort of staying silent was causing him to turn beet red and inflate)
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.
I'm skeptical this is really a huge factor; most bad driving is a matter of choice, not incompetence. And the bad driving that results from incompetence often tends to not be too dangerous. And in countries with strict driving license tests people just try 3, 4, 5, or more times until they get "lucky".
Did US states reduce DL testing complexity in 2020? I mean COVID was weird times. And that could certainly explain the 2020 uptick in wrecks that the article is about.
And why are limitless german highways (I live very close to one) so safe? There are way less death there, by any measure you want, than on U.S. highways.
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.
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.
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.
If we're going deaths by distance travelled: in 2016 (the latest year in the study linked below) the US had 7.3 deaths per billion vehicle-kilometres, while Germany had only 4.2.
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.
This is better, and, see, the numbers are suddenly much closer to each other than before, but...
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.
> The same link says the average in Germany is about 78mph. Ask someone living in the US if that's significantly faster than here.
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.
It's not clear to me that 70 is so very significantly slower than 78. That's a 10% difference. Both speeds are unsafe in inattentive or adverse conditions and safe in attentive nonadverse ones.
For a lot of reasons that is a significant difference (e.g., despite 70mph average, there are also many drivers going the speed limit and that is a speed differential of 10mph or 18mph, nearly twice as much) but I'm not sure it matters at all as far as Germany vs US automotive safety.
Cars in the US also tend to be much larger, to such a degree that the average US vehicle has equal or more kinetic energy at 70mph than its German counterpart at 78mph. Anyway, there are a lot of factors. My only objection in this thread is to the innumeracy of saying "autobahn mumble handwave".
There are plenty of highways in the Northeast where traveling at 78 mph you'll get passed by about as many cars as you pass.
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.
Article starts off a bit poorly as if it is about to suggest that it's all the pandemic's fault because it made everyone crazy, but fortunately it doesn't quite go that far. Of course it would be ridiculous to suggest this. Do we not think that the pandemic wasn't a terrible psychological event for folks in France and Canada too?
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.
Yeah, the article really places the blame squarely on individual bad choices due to declining mental health from covid and other bad news things. I find it plainly absurd that thousands of additional car wrecks are due to people feeling sad about America’s covid response and foreign policy. The only really plausible evidence for this is additional drunk driving due to mental health, but that doesn’t explain most wrecks.
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.
I regularly (in a large city) have to cross a 4-lane, median- divided (with trees) arterial to get to a bus-stop. Its lightly-posted speed-limit is 35 mph, but more recently drivers frequently approach this crossing at 50 to 60 mph (or more on weekends). (The location has no lights or stop-signs nearby.)
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.
> Its lightly-posted speed-limit is 35 mph, but more recently drivers frequently approach this crossing at 50 to 60 mph (or more on weekends)
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.
The better the car infrastructure, the better quality (in terms of modernity, maintenance etc) of an average car on the road, overall the "easier" it is to drive, the worse the drivers in that society are. This should be pretty obvious. I've lived in two countries in Europe, one with a much better/more sane car infrastructure and in that one no one knows how to drive. Which means when something unexpected happens on the road they're not skilled enough to handle it. In the other country I had very stressful/complicated situations almost daily, such that the rules didn't tell you how to act and it was the wild west sometimes. That's when you really learn how to drive, when you're pushed out of your comfort zone by other drivers or by the circumstance on the regular. Not when you drive automatic in perfect weather on wide roads drinking your large coffee with your right hand.
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.
> The obvious answer first off: cell phone usage while driving.
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.
> 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.
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.
If someone's brain chemistry prevents them from driving without doing stupid shit that puts other people's lives in danger, then they shouldn't be allowed to drive.
One thing I noticed while abroad in china, india, and thailand, is that drivers in those countries are much more alert. This could be by necessity because of narrower lanes, or the general amount of chaos on the roads beight higher. In any case the result is that we get lulled into a false sense of security in the US because most people do follow the rules and drive predictably. Since the pandemic especially I see someone actively doing bullshit on their phone/infotainment touchscreen while behind the wheel almost daily.
Having lived and driven in Thailand for the last decade I'm gonna have to disagree with you here.
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.
In Thailand at least, this is due to the high number of motorcycles/scooters. They're far more likely to die in a collision (about 80% of the fatalities are from motorcycles)
I visit Thailand frequently with my family and drunk driving is rampant there. I never drive there after dark due to the danger.
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).
The 2023 data seems ambiguous, some states still have climbing crash rates, some have declining crash rates. If the cause was a reaction to lockdowns shouldn't it have tapered off by now? If the cause was the virus itself affecting behavior then infections are high now so I'd expect the behavior to still be here. But it varies by state in 2023, so what is the explanation for the widespread change in behavior in the places it is continuing?
This is why I drive a large vehicle. Now I, too, get to tell people that having the right of way won't help them when they're dead. Graveyards are full of people who have the right of way and so on. Lots of small car drivers like to pretend that they get the right of way at a 4-way-stop but if you think about it: graves are full of people who had the right of way. So they should just wait for me.
Wait, this has to be a joke post right. Because you drive a large vehicle that means you don't have to give way to people? Perhaps people should follow the rules of the road regardless of the vehicle they drive and superiority complex that may come with it
You're describing a zero-sum game. That is, increasing your chances of living by sharply reducing chances of survival for someone else's family. I personally know a family who lost their father to this equation. (His funeral was the largest I've ever attended.)
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.
Sure, but there's no point pretending they're all saints. They're just not as good at the game as me. They have no problem doing that to bicyclists and to smaller cars; I have no problem doing it to them. Same rules for all. Get big or get out of the way.
I blame Mario Cart. I have a theory that that specific game places really bad habits deep down into the brain and while someone can learn to drive safe enough for a test these latent 'skills' are lurking waiting to reappear. I'm in my mid 50s and I've seen a drastic drop in using turn signals, even by cops over the last 15 or so years. I think this competition style driving comes from Mario cart or other driving games. We played racing games a little, and some of us drove very fast, but we didn't weave and leave other drivers in the dark about our intentions and desired path.
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).