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Comment by BugsJustFindMe | Hacker News Reader

> by any measure you want

You're comparing total numbers of deaths while traveling on highways, which means you need to also compare total passenger miles traveled on highways. Using per capita is utterly absurd. I'm not saying that you're automatically wrong, but your current argument statement is incoherent.

AND ALSO, 40% of the autobahn has speed limits, trucks are always limited, and advisory limits apply everywhere according to https://www.deutschland.de/en/topic/life/germany-and-the-aut...

The link also says "In practice, this means that there are only a few stretches of road where you can really drive at unlimited speeds during the day."

AND ALSO, speed limits aside, what's the actual average traveling speed difference between the two countries for passenger vehicles? The same link says the average in Germany is about 78mph. Ask someone living in the US if that's significantly faster than here.

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If we're going deaths by distance travelled: in 2016 (the latest year in the study linked below) the US had 7.3 deaths per billion vehicle-kilometres, while Germany had only 4.2.

Interestingly, the same report shows a reduction of 12.1% in total road deaths between 2010 and 2016, while the US had an increase of 13.5% over the same period.

I'm scared to even list the US's increase pedestrian deaths caused by drivers. No regard for human life at all.

Source: https://www.itf-oecd.org/sites/default/files/docs/irtad-road...

This is better, and, see, the numbers are suddenly much closer to each other than before, but...

Absent some indication that the two countries put the same number of people in each vehicle on average, it needs to be passenger miles, not vehicle miles, and for the purposes of this particular thread, it needs to be specifically highway miles and then probably further clustered by speed.

Because the parent comment's statement was some potshot "autobahn go fast" snark about highway speed limits. We all know (I hope) that a huge percentage of vehicle incidents happen at intersections and on country roads, which the US has more of by virtue of its geographic spread and which are not designed particularly safely here. And we all (I hope) know that americans behave antisocially and are bad at implementing long-term plans that would improve society for everyone. Those are rightly given.

> The same link says the average in Germany is about 78mph. Ask someone living in the US if that's significantly faster than here.

That's significantly higher than average speed on highways in western Washington. The nominal speed limit is 60 and average speed is about 70 mph. Once you get east into the mountains where the limit goes up to 70, the average rises as well (during good conditions, anyway). Many more people drive around the western side of the state than on that rural section of I-90, though.

It's not clear to me that 70 is so very significantly slower than 78. That's a 10% difference. Both speeds are unsafe in inattentive or adverse conditions and safe in attentive nonadverse ones.

For a lot of reasons that is a significant difference (e.g., despite 70mph average, there are also many drivers going the speed limit and that is a speed differential of 10mph or 18mph, nearly twice as much) but I'm not sure it matters at all as far as Germany vs US automotive safety.

Cars in the US also tend to be much larger, to such a degree that the average US vehicle has equal or more kinetic energy at 70mph than its German counterpart at 78mph. Anyway, there are a lot of factors. My only objection in this thread is to the innumeracy of saying "autobahn mumble handwave".

There are plenty of highways in the Northeast where traveling at 78 mph you'll get passed by about as many cars as you pass.

On a recent 750+ mile each way road trip, I averaged 70 mph on a door-to-door wall-clock basis (start the timer, drive 750 miles, stop the timer, divide). That was with three short stops one way and two on the way back, and we got passed by almost no one.

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