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.
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.
And road rage seems to be up as well, at least in my area. What we need, I think, is strict enforcement of certain traffic laws, and perhaps some new ones, depending on the area, such as:
- no passing on the right - quite often a symptom of road rage due to a perceived slow driver
- stay right except to pass - you’re in violation if you can move right while maintaining speed but choose not to (speed limit isn’t relevant here)
- holding up traffic at a stop light - not proceeding through within 5 seconds of a green light while having right of way
- aggressive driving - cutting people off, crossing multiple lanes of traffic, etc
I see most of this every day, yet the police just set up speed traps and pull people over who are driving safely. I’d much rather people speed than do the above.
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.
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.
Maybe American drivers were always shitty, but their increasing size makes them more fatal
Combination of drivers getting worse, lower seatbelt use, and bigger vehicles, as I tried to summarize at the top.
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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.
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.
The timing coincides with COVID so I wonder if it really is the whole anti-masker “government can’t tell me what do and besides I’m immortal!” mentality.
Could be; could also be that infection alters peoples behavior.
Or just that people who would wear seatbelts drove less because they’re generally more worried about their health, and the people who don’t wear seatbelts didn’t change driving behavior.
Oh interesting, solid theory! Not so much that their behavior changed but that it DIDN’T change…
I think there’s also a correlation with anti-police sentiment as well. Police are less interested in protecting the public if the public doesn’t support them. So maybe them letting aggressive drivers go is a sort of message to the public that we need the police.
Likewise, I think there’s increased aggressiveness partially because there was a lot less traffic for a couple years during COVID shutdowns, and now it’s back to normal, but it feels worse because of that period where traffic was less.
I’m sure there are plenty of other explanations as well. I’d like to see an investigation that pulls together a lot of theories and evaluates their merits.
Darwinism at work.
- 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.
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)
Well the obvious answer is that Canadians are just better than us lol
As a Canadian, I’d love to believe that. As someone who’s recently driven in and out of Vancouver a bunch of times…I really don’t.
