[ndm000]

After a recent 3 week driving trip through Europe, I can anecdotally back this up. It’s not even the manual transmission, but also the much smaller roads with no shoulder where at times you meet a car, have to slam on the brakes, and decide in the moment whether you or the other car will back up to a turn out. You have to pay constant attention and there’s little room for looking at phones, eating, etc. In the US we have such large roads and shoulders that you can zone out and are more easily tempted to take your eyes off the road.

[oblio]

This is backed by infrastructure studies. It's called traffic calming and it's done on purpose in places with advanced infrastructure such as the Netherlands.

[kccqzy]

In the same vein, I encourage neighbors to park their cars on the street rather than in their garage or driveway so the neighborhood street becomes narrower for traffic due to a row of parked cars on each side of the street. Works better than posted speed limit.

[CaptainPistache]

That's just a bad idea. Cars passing through the street won't see the kids and kids won't see the cars.

[prmoustache]

It is kind of a moot point when so many cars in the USA end up crunching people on the sidewalk or their own driveway...where the kids usually are.

I'd rather have one of those people who drive distracted crash into my parked car than on my lawn.

[cjs_ac]

Demonstrably incorrect on my street, which has hotly contested on-street parking that narrows the roadway to a single lane. Cars have to stop and reverse into parking spaces to pass each other. Yet children play ball games in the street, and stop to move out of the way of the cars, with the cars barely needing to brake.

Children are not mindless suicide machines; they learn at a tremendous rate from their environment. The children you see around you might not survive on my street, but that's because they haven't lived there for all of their lives.