We also have terrible road design where everything is built like a freeway with absolutely zero pedestrian/bike safety. And when bike corridors, traffic easing, or pedestrian safety infrastructure is installed all the boomers collectively loose their minds.

Because they’re allowed to be? Any time a driver kills a pedestrian or a cyclist it is nearly always the victim who is blamed. They commit serious, dangerous errors while driving and only get tickets for it. Licensing is a joke, a literal child is being given license to drive a death machine and never has to test their skill again.

It’s giant shitshow that everyone pretends doesn’t have a solution but very clearly does- driving should be by profession only. And yes, that would mean rural drivers and commuters would need special licenses to get to and from work.

They are tired, overworked, stressed out, not regularly re tested for their licenses, they are in a hurry because they demand convenience and they drive absolutely massive and oversized vehicles, and almost none of them can either afford the money or the time to basic maintenance and ensure their vehicles are actually safe to drive, and due to society in general collapsing, police barely ever respond to reports of drivers violating traffic laws unless they actually seriously injure or kill someone or do absolutely massive property damage, oh right and somehow it is still a widely popular and normalized thing amongst many drivers to drive drunk, high, do their makeup while driving or be on their phone in a manner that reduces their situational awareness and reaction times to basically nill.

Do cars still kill more people than guns in America, or did guns finally overtake automobiles?

This paragraph just seemed like a fancier version of the “nut behind the wheel” excuse:

Above all, though, the problem seems to be us — the American public, the American driver. “It’s not an exaggeration to say behavior on the road today is the worst I’ve ever seen,” Capt. Michael Brown, a state police district commander in Michigan, told me. “It’s not just the volume. It’s the variety. There’s impaired driving, which constituted 40 percent of our fatalities last year. There are people going twice the legal limit on surface streets. There’s road rage,” Brown went on. “There’s impatience — right before we started talking, I got an email from a woman who was driving along in traffic and saw some guy fly by her off the roadway, on the shoulder, at 80, 90 miles an hour.” Brown stressed it was rare to receive such a message: “It’s got so bad, so extremely typical,” he said, “that people aren’t going to alert us unless it’s super egregious.”

My immediate mental response to this police captain was:

• Yes, drivers are driving too fast, but most city streets should be constructed to make that all but impossible (raised crosswalks, continuous sidewalks, narrowed lanes, barriers, trees, etc.).
• Yes, drivers are overly aggressive or impatient, and police/prosecutors don’t prosecute them when they commit acts of road rage, and state legislatures outlaw the use of red-light or speed cameras in many instances.
• Yes, drivers drink and drive, because we have a nation full of bars that can’t be accessed without a car and it’s not safe to walk home from the pub where there are no sidewalks.
• Yes, drivers are on their phones, because they never get caught or prosecuted and most new cars integrate mobile devices and encourage their usage.

Other countries have highways, cell phones, and bad drivers, but their injury/fatality rates are much lower. The difference is American road design, the size/weight of American vehicles, and the lack of transportation alternatives in most communities in America.

Does it have anything to do with the giant SUVs and trucks we drive maybe?

Because you can make statistics say anything you want to?

We are an extremely car dependent nation and therefore have more vehicles per capita than most other countries, and drive more miles, leading to more opportunities for vehicle collisions.

Fatalities per 100,000 vehicles, we average below what Europe as a whole does. Europe as a whole averages 19 fatalities per 100,000 cars. The US averages 16.1.

Africa as a whole averages 574 fatalities per 100k cars. Southeast Asia averages 101 per 100k cars. The Americas as a whole average 33 per 100k cars.

And per 100,000 people the US itself varies by state just like Europe does per country. The US ranges from a low of 5.7 per 100,000 people in Rhode Island (on par with France or Canada which both have 5.8) to a high of 26.2 in Mississippi (on par with Ghana).