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.