[CalRobert]

To get a decent idea of what's going on, you need to know VMT per capita, fatalities per vmt, how many crashes are fatal, and ideally quite a few other things (urban/rural mix, etc.).

One of the best ways to make roads safer would be to just let people drive less. The US has fairly safe roads per VMT (by world standards), but people end up driving a lot more than in most other places, which negates this somewhat.

[m_mueller]

I'd argue that even by VMT the US isn't that safe - it's still double the fatalities compared to the UK.

[CalRobert]

Agreed - thus my comment that this is comparing to the world. Western Europe has remarkably "safe" roads (scare quotes because we call them safe despite tens of thousands of people dying per year).

Of course, one problem is that despite being a very small percentage of the distance traveled, people walking account for 22% of deaths. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/...