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Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

Distance driven per capita would be a better metric than population

Including the worked-out answer in your comment would also be better. Or see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... which lists those numbers for 2019 and points out that population is only one of several relevant comparison:

         per 100k       per 100k     per 1 billion
       inhabitants   motor vehicles   vehicle km
         per year       per year
        ----------     --------       ----------
  UK        2.9           5.7         3.8 (in 2010)
  USA      12.9          16.1         8.3 (in 2022)

This is probably the best we can reasonably do but even this doesn't show the whole picture. I think it makes it look like most (but not all) of the safety difference is due to much less distance driven in the UK. But, given identical attitudes and driving style, I would expect accidents per km to be much higher in the UK because more time is spent on much slower urban roads in town centres (perhaps not big city centres so much) and UK suburban (which is much higher density => smaller distance than US suburban). So the spatial density of opportunity for vehicle/pedrestrian collision is much greater.

Perhaps per unit time spent driving would be closer, but still not there.

But that's all to say, I think the UK numbers are better than the USA ones by an even larger factor than they appear.

> This is probably the best we can reasonably do but even this doesn't show the whole picture.

Well, the numbers I gave only concern "deaths by vehicles", not "accidents". ("Accident" is a misnomer as it's a marketing term used to normalize car collisions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident#Accidents_by_vehicle .)

The death rate increases with speed, and I think US policies encourage higher speeds than the UK. UK cars also tend to be smaller and lighter, which reduces the size of the blind spots and the fatality rate of collisions.

We can surely do better than my stats as there are a lot of publications on this topic.

The United States is also massive geographically and road policies and enforcement vary dramatically.

New York State, which similiar to the UK in regards to one massive metropolis, several large cities, and then lots of rural areas, has 5.8 deaths per 100k.

Mississippi, which even its big cities are completely car dominated has 26.2 deaths per 100k.

It comes down to a lot of things. When less of your population is driving, you're going to have less death. Big city streets are usually congested which slows vehicle speeds which in turns reduces deaths, and its politically difficult to slow cars down in a car dependent culture, as most people want to speed. I'll also point out that for a lot of the south and midwest, you drive to the bar and you drive away from the bar. They make bars with 50+ parking spots and then say "Don't drive drunk!".

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

Which serves to highlight buro9's original complaint in this thread: "The deaths by vehicles is astonishing" ... "Virtually no-one who owned the set of decisions that led to those deaths face any consequence of any kind... for ending someone's life." etc.

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