Yes, while road design could be better, a contributing problem is that US sprawl requires people to travel longer distances to commute/shop/etc. This then contributes to a desire for higher roadway speeds and the designs that support those higher speeds.
miles driven/person is also a choice that the US has made.
Even in sprawling suburbia, most trips a person takes are under 3 miles, eminently bikeable, but the bike infrastructure and built environment sucks for that. So people drive, from parking lot to parking lot.
The fact that the US is huge doesn't mean that the majority of miles driven are on long trips.
> Even in sprawling suburbia, most trips a person takes are under 3 miles
That is surprising to me. Is that factoring in trips to the neighbors or to the mailbox or something? Because the average US driver drives over 39 miles per day.
hmm. fair enough. I have heard the short trip stat bandied about a lot. Having spent time with people in the suburbs, even close in suburbs, the stat makes sense... if you exclude commute to work. When I visit my parents in stroadville, a trip to the store is 2 miles each way and should be easily bikeable, but bike infra is non existent so everyone drives.
One note about the framing. The average US Driver excludes everyone who isn't a driver
> One note about the framing. The average US Driver excludes everyone who isn't a driver
That's true but traveling by car is so overwhelmingly common that it doesn't swing the stats much. Only about 3% of people travel by public transit (most of which is a bus on the road anyway) and another 3% under their own power, with most of that being people who walk (mostly those who work/live in the same place).
(Traffic deaths / km driven) was NaN for most of human history. It's a dumb metric with dumb units.
There should be a well-defined unitless quantity that's real-valued across human history, say normalizing by population size and total human travel. I am not claiming that fixes the NaN, just that the NaN is a smell.
Another smell is that everyone being horribly maimed but never killed would not be a victory for safety though the above metric says it'd be great.
Well it's also a good metric if you are trying to make an argument that the US has unsafe infrastructure compared to other countries like the article does.
Also making it illegal to build dense walkable cities like we used to is the choice that causes many people to live in the suburbs. It isn't just a preference for suburban style living. It is more efficient to live in cities and should be less expensive, but because we have made building housing effectively illegal, city real estate is incredibly expensive.