[bkjelden]

Speed kills.

A road where traffic moves at 30mph can be poorly designed and lead to lots of accidents, but so long as those accidents are not a vehicle hitting a pedestrian they're unlikely to be fatal.

A road where traffic moves at 70mph is another story.

[naniwaduni]

More people also just die where there are more people...

[ajuc]

USA has 12.9 traffic deaths per 100 000 people yearly with 330 million people.

Europe as a whole has 7.4 with 746.4 million people, and developed EU countries are around or under 5. Surface area is actually quite similar 9.3 million vs 10 million km2.

There are countries with population densities higher and lower than US in there, and ALL BUT ONE OF THEM have less traffic deaths than US. It's Bosnia and Herzegovina by the way. And it's at 13.5.

USA is crazy unsafe for a developed country, and it barely matters if you compare with sparsely populated Canada (5.2) or Sweden (2.0), or densely populated Germany (3.7) or Japan (2.1).

It's not about population nor population density. It's not about wealth. It's not about population distribution.

It's about car-centrism and insane design.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[andrepd]

It's a crazy comparison because Germany for example is still an incredibly car-centric country.

[blackeyeblitzar]

12.9 still seems very low to me. What makes the lower number better? I wouldn’t want the difference between 12.9 and 7.4 if it means I need to give up on driving cars and take slow inconvenient public transit or be limited to where public transit takes me. Cars are freedom.

I would also argue the US is more successful than literally every other country in part because of fast road infrastructure. So maybe they’re all just making the wrong tradeoff.

[ajuc]

> What makes the lower number better?

~20 000 fewer people dying per year.

> I wouldn’t want the difference between 12.9 and 7.4 if it means I need to give up on driving cars

You don't need to give up driving cars. People do drive cars outside USA.

> slow inconvenient public transit

When it's done right it's more convenient than cars. I own a car and I drive under 3000 km per year because I just barely need it.

> I would also argue the US is more successful

The only metric I can think of where this is true is military, which does not seem relevant :)

[abenga]

> I wouldn’t want the difference between 12.9 and 7.4

Do you volunteer to be one of the 5.5 in your slice of 100K?