TL;DR - lower seatbelt use, higher drunk driving, more speeding.
I blame our cultural sense of individualism and it creating a sense of having a right to ignore the rules when we want. It's everywhere. You see it in the soccer mom taking a cartful of groceries to the express check-out demanding to be served because she doesn't want to wait in line. You see it in young computer users who torrent television shows or video games because they don't want to pay full price for entertainment. You see it in the rich who store their wealth in tax havens. We have tabloids about celebrities with substance abuse or marital problems. We have whole genres of heroes who flaunt authority from comic book characters who engage in vigilante justice to cowboys, soldiers, and cops who decide to take matters into their own hands. We not only engage and celebrate in this behavior, but we always seem to find ways to justify it. So what do we get from that? We get the sense that rules, even ones that are there to protect us and keep us from harming ourselves and each other, can be pushed, bent, broken, and worked around. Use you're seatbelt cause it's safe. Don't speed cause speeding is dangerous. Don't drink and drive because it's super dangerous. Don't expect those rules to apply to you though, cause you're an American, you can do what you want. Then when someone tells you no, punishes you, or heaven forbid something disastrous happens, you get to play the outrage/entitlement/victim card. /rantlower seatbelt use, higher drunk driving, more speeding.
I linked the article but it didn't sit quite right. Some statistics not mentioned in the article: miles driven per capita. Fatalities per mile. The seat belt thing is dumb, no doubt; my grandmother refused to wear one until she put herself in the hospital for two months and while I've never taken a driver's test in another country I know the one I took involved driving around the block and parking. This in a city where the nearest Taco Bell was half an hour's drive at 60mph on what has long been considered one of the two most dangerous roads in the US. And while there's no easy way to compare "distance to nearest bar by country" I reckon you've got less travel ahead of you if you're blitzed in Mannheim than if you're blitzed in Montana. I don't know if France lowers the speed limits when they need to make more revenue from speeding tickets. I know Texas does. I know New Mexico does. I know Arizona does. Is it entitlement to drive the speed the road was designed for, rather than the speed designed to frustrate you into getting a ticket? 'cuz growing up, the state Attorney General called a press conference with all three networks in attendance to announce to the fine folx of New Mexico that if a tribal cop tried to pull them over for speeding, they were to keep truckin' along because the tribe had no authority over white people and they were doing shit like knocking the speed limits down from 65 to 35 (on roads they didn't own). Know what drove piracy up? The rise in album prices from $9.99 (where the'd been from '78 to '90) to $17.99. Know what drove piracy down? iTunes setting album prices at $9.99. Capital tried to propose that back when people were still buying CDs. They were threatened with a lawsuit by the RIAA. Two years later, Tower Records went out of business... and marked their CDs down all the way to $12.99. How much is Spotify? $9.99 a month. how much is iTunes? $9.99 a month. How much is Pandora Premium? $9.99 a month. How much is Google Music? $9.99 a month. It's almost as if the public decided what they were willing to pay for music, and the music industry survived so long as they abided by the public's appetite. As soon as they stepped out of line they invited the existence of Napster. It's like Blockbuster - 16% of their revenue was late fees. Their entire structure was arranged in making you pay more than you expected. What's Redbox's late fee structure? $1.50 a day until you bought the damn thing for $25 at which point, keep it. Redbox is dandy. Blockbuster is dead. What's Netflix's late fee schedule, by the way? No new discs until we have your old ones. How much is Netflix? $8.99 a month. In summary, I have a hard time blaming the downfall of Western civilization on our decision to flaunt the speed limit. I also have a hard time blaming Americans for the fact that we die in cars a lot more than the French. We do everything in cars a lot more than the French so of course that includes dying.
I did some digging in a textbook that I have on traffic and transport safety. It takes a whole bunch of statistics from the OECT/ITF yearly IRTAD Road Safety Annual Report. It's 568 pages (because it has a chapter detailing each OECD country), but the juicy bits are in the first chapter. The real data I think you're looking for is all in Table 1.3, Road Fatalities per 100k inhabitants, 100 billion vehicle-km and 10k registered vehicles: If you compare the US with deaths per billion vehicle-kilometers, you can still see the US declining less fast: FR 25.9 5.9 SL 65.1 6.7 UK 12.8 3.4 US 12.9 7.0 Sidenote: it puts seatbelt use for U.S. front seat passengers at 91% (similar to other countries) and rear seats at 70% (on the low end), see page 30.Looking at the longer-term developments since 2010, the number of road deaths has decreased in all countries with validated data except in the United States, Chile and Sweden. In the United States, fatalities increased by 6.3% between 2010 and 2015 and indications suggest that the situation has not improved in 2016.
1990 2015
I appreciate the digging, but my point is that if Russian Roulette has a 1 in 6 chance of killing you every time you play, and Americans play Russian Roulette twice as often as Britons, then twice as many Americans are going to get killed playing Russian Roulette regardless of the safety of the guns they're using. That top graph indicates that Americans play Russian Roulette a lot more than anybody else and regardless of how much they spin the cylinder or how long they pull the trigger, the fact of the matter is, Americans spend a lot longer putting themselves in harm's way... and that while vehicle use in the rest of the world is leveling off, vehicle use in the US is increasing. Check this one out:
What the above table shows is that when corrected for sheer volume of driving (the red line) or when corrected for sheer volume of vehicles (the 'per 10k vehicles' stat), the U.S. fatality declines less than other countries. It doesn't say anything about the interaction effect of having both a large volume of vehicles and miles driven. That is your argument, right? I couldn't find numbers that corrected for both. It's a shame China doesn't provide reliable numbers, since they are also experiencing a very large rise in vehicles and vehicle miles.
And that second graph I linked shows it pretty clearly - US traffic deaths are clearly not declining at the rate of everyone else which is why the line crosses over Britain and Sweden in like '93 and Japan and France in 2005. My argument hinges around why. The linked article says exactly what rd95 and goobster want it to say - "because Americans are assholes." I have never not seen that sort of argument be overly-simplistic at best and wrong at worst. The Brits, the French, the Swedes and the Japanese are assholes, too but that's just motive. It's not method, means and opportunity. Newsweek, of course, is happy to oversimplify the issue. If you get a little more rigorous on it you discover that there isn't even a lot of consistency of how many drivers are tested for drunk driving, which skews the accident statistics. Here's what I know: I dated a Serbian girl who every year would make a big road trip to the coast with her family. They'd pack up the car, buy snacks, get the maps out and settle in for a mind-blowing three hour drive. In Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larssen has his hero travel from Stockholm to the "back of beyond", an island an hour north of Gavle. That makes it two hours by car. here in the United States, you can drive about a thousand miles a day. Two hours? I have friends that commute that to work every day. and back. IF: Driving is inherently dangerous AND: American culture simply involves more driving THEN: it's entirely possible that the reason our death rate is going down less fast than the rest of the world is we're closer to the asymptote. And I don't think it's fair to wave hands and say "it's because Americans are assholes."
I have to admit, part of me also wanted that simple answer. My tiny roadtrip from San Diego to LA and back felt like a long-ass drive. And in that six hours, I got cut off by an asshole in a BMW thrice. But it's not like the rest of the world are saints: the Dutch are known to drive selfishly, rarely making room when you want to merge for example. Germans are nicer but are worse at tailgaiting. What I did find worrisome was that driving in the U.S. and Canada was way easier (in terms of mental energy needed) than I expected. I did not feel like I needed to pay attention as much as I do over here, like once I'm on the right avenue I just have to follow the guy in front of me and not run a red light, even in dense urban areas. It was tempting to check my phone because driving was legitimately more boring than I was used to. My impression is that distracted driving is a much bigger issue over there than here.
Dan Ariely wrote The Honest Truth about Dishonesty. Want to know what that truth is? We all break the rules. Doesn't really matter what background or culture. BUT we only do it a little - only to a degree that we can get away with it and still sleep at night. We all slightly fudge the numbers in our tax reports, we all slightly go over the limit, because rules are suggestions when we think we have more than enough reason to make an exception this one time. Road designers know this, and take it into account: Fun fact about consultancy: usually, you get paid by the hour and you need to round the hours worked to whole or half hours. Pretty much everyone rounds up and nobody rounds down. As a result, everyone gets paid slightly less per hour worked than they should if everyone was honest. So if you are the only fully honest person you're the idiot who gets paid the least. Label me 'Neutral Evil', but I'm not going to be that idiot. (P.S. that Wiki stub is a terrible article. Yuck.)
I thought Michigan reached peak stupid when our legislature devoted a huge amount of time and effort to repeal our motorcycle helmet law. Of course then we elected Trump, are encouraging kid Rock to run, and recently voted to allow concealed carry in schools, so I wasn't even close, but still pretty dumb. We seem to be moving more in the direction that individual choice is the only thing that matters always and forever. That's unfortunate because health societies should be a balance of individual rights and collective sense of community. I suppose one relevant question that liberalism struggles with is, "whose community?" Collective values have to have a foundation in some institution, and the sacrifice that comes with then is always going to favor some lifestyles over others. Not sure how to solve that broadly, but at least technology should make cars safer in the near future.
while I agree with the concept of not being a dick thereby affecting other people... I am strangely in favor of letting people ride without lids and drive without belts. Neither of those directly affect others. Having said that, I wear helmets and use seat belts... I just think those are a matter of choice. I'm not religious about this and could likely be swayed...
There are of course practical concerns. TL;DR over 90% of people wear seat belts, and a staggering 56% of traffic fatalities were from people not wearing seat belts. That's an insane increase in your odds of dying or being severely injured in a car accident when you choose not to use a seat belt (surely the odds are swayed somewhat by the fact that non-seat belt wearers are probably shittier drivers and thus cause more accidents). Of course that insane $50 billion price tag mostly falls on society to pick up (not to mention the traffic jams that happen after a fatal accident). All these things are me rationalizing what I feel internally however, which is basically that there's been a radical breakdown in the social covenant in recent years (or at least a tumultuous realignment in process). I think rd95 is getting at a similar point: that when we don't care for ourselves, it's everyone who suffers. We're all going to do harmful things to ourselves and others sometimes; I think that's unavoidable. But for petty things like a seat belt? If you're too dumb to figure out that you should buckle up, then you're too dumb to get to decide; the state should get to tell you you have to.
Not to sway you, but the impact of death ripples. Children lose their parents, friends lose each other, people involved in the accident, even if not directly responsible for the death, will suffer emotional trauma. When a person dies before there time, before the world is ready to let them go, they leave behind them a hole like a wound that is hard to heal but easy to re-open. So yeah, wear your seatbelts and helmets, because it's not just about you. It's also about the people you share your world with.
And beyond the personal losses there is increased healthcare burden and loss of skill within companies and industries.
Technically speaking, those things benefit other people. Not to be too grim about it, but quite a few high-quality organs come from folks riding motorcycles without helmets. There's a reason ER doc's make jokes about 'Donorcycles.' Source: My boss works directly with Gift of Life, and we are starting a new project in conjunction with them soon. It's a temporary benefit until we get all the kinks out of growing organs in petri dishes, but until that day comes, there is still a high demand for every tissue type you can think of.Neither of those directly affect others.
Holy crap. 75% of the vehicles on the road in America are consistently running in excess of the speed limit. There's a lot to unpack in that one statistic right there. The sense of entitlement we are raised with from birth - American exceptionalism - manifests is such shitty, rude, and inconsiderate adults.
You have to factor in design speeds, though. When a road is 60 it is generally designed with radii for 70 or 75 (here at least). People drive at the speed that they feel like they can handle, so it's not a huge surprise that people do it, although I agree it's still large share.
Very true. Having just driven an Audi A4 for two weeks straight around the British Isles, I got to deeply immerse myself in another country's driving culture for a while. The brits don't bother with speed limit signs and speed traps and cops hiding with radar guns. People drive according to the conditions, and - if they don't - they crash. THEN the police show up, call you a tit for driving like an ass, and scrape your body off the pavement. One-lane country roads, to B roads, A roads, and M routes, everyone behaved like they owned rear view mirrors and didn't want to unnecessarily impede other traffic. Except in London, and it's surrounding area within the M1. Everyone driving there drove like a typical American road-hog dick. It's been interesting to come back to America and see the entitled shittiness we impose on our fellow citizens just because we are sitting behind a steering wheel...
Motor vehicles per 1000 people, UK: 519 Motor vehicles per 1000 people, US: 797 Miles per car per year, UK, 2013: 8000 Miles per car per year, US, 2013: 12,000 Imagine the US with 2/3rds as many cars going 2/3rds as far. I'll bet we'd all find it a lot more pleasant. London was able to pass a congestion tax. NY was not. I believe that speaks volumes about the practicality of getting around the UK with moderate car use vs. getting around the US.
Also: Roundabouts. Jeebus Crisp those things work REALLY WELL. Roundabout coming up... slow speed a bit... check to the right... look for a hole in traffic... move around the roundabout to your exit... speed up to highway speeds again. Stopping at traffic lights and stop signs is really fucking annoying after driving in countries with roundabouts.
Preach! They're not great if you are prone to get car sickness, but they are safer by lowering the speed for everyone and in most low-to-medium-volume intersections they can process more traffic from more directions. What I've heard (as in, anecdotally) is that drivers in the US are not taught what it is and that pretty much nobody knows how to properly yield. Did you also get to see a turbo-roundabout? Instead of a circle, it consists of two interlocking spirals: My hometown of 100k already has more than a hundred roundabouts, but added a dozen of those in recent years because they can handle a much larger capacity. It obviously has a larger footprint, since two directions need to pick a lane, but it's pretty darn cool.
Making a left in that turbo roundabout seems more finicky than it needs to be. It seems like this is going to be more trouble for anyone that doesn't know exactly where they are going. It also only works where there are 4 potential exits. Add an exit, and the middle lane becomes a wasteland of lost tourists, wandering aimlessly... ;-) Well ok, maybe not THAT bad! But I think in the UK the majority of the roundabouts had more than 4 exits. Heck... maybe that's why roundabouts came up in the first place... to make it easier to join multiple roads, rather than just a crossroads...
To put some numbers behind it, the theoretical capacity for a regular roundabout is 20-25k vehicles/day, whereas the above can process up to 40k/day, mostly dependent on where the largest flows come from. (A regular intersection with traffic lights can handle between 20-35k.)
All directions can use the heuristic 'if you go left, take the left lane, if you go right, take the right lane.' It looks harder than it actually is! You're right though, it's a solution that does not always fit the problem. Dual-lane roundabouts usually create more confusion because people might not change lanes in time, like here: 
This is what I see, or rather don't see, in America. I started to type out a reply to rd95 that I don't see soccer moms demanding use of the express lane with 50 items, I see people in self checkouts who have no idea how to use them taking way too long. The problem seems (to me) not people who say "screw your inconvenience" but rather people who simply have no idea that changing their behavior slightly would have no impact on them but benefit others. Being injured, fatally or otherwise, when it could have been minimized or avoided by a seatbelt has a large impact on others, and I think too many people don't realize that.everyone behaved like they owned rear view mirrors and didn't want to unnecessarily impede other traffic.