Why Are American Drivers So Deadly?
www.nytimes.com
After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.

The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.

… The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.

  • sugar_in_your_tea
    1·
    10 months ago

    And road rage seems to be up as well, at least in my area. What we need, I think, is strict enforcement of certain traffic laws, and perhaps some new ones, depending on the area, such as:

    • no passing on the right - quite often a symptom of road rage due to a perceived slow driver
    • stay right except to pass - you’re in violation if you can move right while maintaining speed but choose not to (speed limit isn’t relevant here)
    • holding up traffic at a stop light - not proceeding through within 5 seconds of a green light while having right of way
    • aggressive driving - cutting people off, crossing multiple lanes of traffic, etc

    I see most of this every day, yet the police just set up speed traps and pull people over who are driving safely. I’d much rather people speed than do the above.