The accident rate in the U.S. per 100,000 people is pretty high but I had always thought that was due to the fact that we drive so many miles per person per year. However, sorting the table in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate shows that we may simply be incompetent and/or be afflicted with poorly engineered roads. The fatality rate per billion vehicle-kilometers is 7.6 in the U.S., higher than countries that don’t have our divided highways and that have reputations for chaos in the streets. Israel, for example, is at 5.2. France at 6.3. Ireland at 3.4. Why isn’t pushing our fatality rate down to the Irish or Swedish (3.7) level an attainable goal? Is it because Google Cars will save us from ourselves soon enough?
22 thoughts on “Why are Americans so bad at driving?”
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One thing I have noticed having driven a lot in both Canada and USA is that the USA has more variation, possibly due to roads and buildings, being built before the auto was invented. In Canada, all the merge lanes are about the same length, while in USA you can have both very short and very long merge lanes. My guess is that it is during the traffic changes that more accidents occur, and the lack of conformity means more confusion and errors in judgment by drivers. Then again, it could be more simple – perhaps the higher rate is simply due to more very young and very old drivers? If you “binned” the death rate by age ranges, comparing each age range, I wonder what correlations would be seen.
This is an interesting question. Having seen the chaos in driving habits in other countries, I just assumed that Americans, who are in an environment where they are often forced to drive to get to work or to do chores and drive on really highly regulated roads, are better drivers than elsewhere. It turns out not to be true. I’ve noticed immigrant taxi drivers to be horrible, but I could just be seeing difficulty in conforming to American traffic patterns.
Possible culprits could be that American traffic is over-regulated or at least badly regulated. Also, the system where you get a license to drive when you are a teenager after a fairly lengthy process, then are never tested again for the rest of your life, and its really hard to lose your license, is to me a strange way of doing things, but I don’t know if its different in other countries.
Driver Training has never been a big priority and I haven’t understood that.
We seem to understand training and instructed practice makes us better at piano, math, football, medicine, cooking, …. Basic driver training classes are not mandatory, nor is there any incentive to have refresher or advanced courses.
Bob Bondurant offers this course for teenagers who already have had a license for six months:
http://www.bondurant.com/courses/advanced-teenage-driving
ADVANCED TEENAGE DRIVING
Advanced Teenage Driving
One of the most sought after courses we teach at Bondurant is requested by parents for their teenage drivers. We design teen programs to maximize the time allotted, teach skills and build confidence. Our Advanced Teenage Driving course builds on the fundamentals learned in the Teen Driving Program; students are required to have a valid driver’s license and a minimum of six months driving experience.
We teach teens unmatched and proven techniques in maximum car control and active driving skills that could someday save their lives.
Skid control
On-track driving and proper line techniques
Accident avoidance, emergency lane changes, and braking distance
Practical, personal instruction behind the wheel
Pre-requisites: Valid driver’s license and six-months prior driving experience
Seems brilliant to me, and incredibly fun too.
I wonder what percentage of these accidents is on snow/ice. Also, US has a lot of country roads with high speed limit, hence high fatality rate as ambulances may take a long time to get there, unlike in Israel. Also, car ownership and driving among American teenagers is probably one of the highest in the world (not sure how that scales with scooter/motorcycle driving by teens in the rest of the world). Accident reporting may be another factor, as Americans are less likely to settle privately than through insurance company in case of minor accidents.
I think it’s mainly because 1) the very lax and permissive nature of most state DMVs granting driver licenses to very marginal drivers plus 2) the high rate of adult immigrants to the United States that get their first driver license after they arrive here since they never drove in the country they emigrated from.
Despite what teenagers might think, it really takes about 8 to 10 years to master the art of driving. That’s the reason why auto insurance rates fall when one turns 25 (since by that time most American-born drivers have accumulated about 8 to 9 years of driving experience behind the wheel).
But now you have recent middle-age immigrants from places like Hong Kong where they never learned how to drive, learning to drive here in the United States. That’s why they’re bad drivers. (Not because they’re Asian but because they never had any previous experience behind the wheel). Yet after failing the driving test multiple times, a state DMV usually relents and they finally pass their drivers test though they are, at best, marginal drivers.
And then add to this that bad drivers (who had their driver license revoked) still drive their cars without a license. Locally a few years back, our sheriff department mounted at enforcement operation by monitoring the courthouse parking lot of who drove in for their court appearance. They found many people (over 60%) who had suspended (or revoked) licenses DROVE IN to their court appearance. They were duly cited and the judge handling their case was duly notified of the transgression.
To throw in another course for teens….
http://streetsurvival.org/
(I learned of this while being a moderately regular autocrosser, e.g. ‘entry level car racing’. The local group received a request for instructors. I didn’t participate, but I will say that at age 30+ spending several years learning to drive a car at its limits around autocross courses I had to unlearn several bad habits that I never knew I had…)
That sounds like a good course (and much less expensive).
I learned a lot from an autocrossing weekend with a local car club. (I also did go home needing some new tires…) But I learned a great deal.
It’s not a mystery, this has been studied by everyone from WHO, to the Insurance Institute, to National Research Council, all those useless beaurocrats wasting our Freedom dollars. The answer is not enough government intervention. The roads are built by central government in Sweden and France (paid for centrally to large companies) not by the croniest or cheapest contractor hired by local or state government. That’s not the main issue though. We don’t have uniform laws like motorcycle helmets not required in some states, while many European countries require full gear tested to conform to standards – http://www.motorcyclegear.com/info_pages/faq_armor_ratings_explained.html). Seatbelts not required in the backseat in some states.
Alcohol, seatbelt and speeding laws are not sufficiently enforced. Implementation and enforcement of latest safety research (Traffic circles!) are more thorough than here due to freedom.
This is one report I was thinking of from a few years ago: http://www.roadsbridges.com/nrc-us-falls-behind-reducing-traffic-fatalities
It’s also interesting to note that some of the countries with a low death rate either have very busy roads (low average speed) or are sparse populated (low chance of collision). The US could be in a “sweet spot” death rate wise.
I also wonder whether rates of impaired (drug/alcohol,sleepy) driving and driving while texting/phoning differ? All contribute to accident rates.
Also there are parts of the US where winter weather is extremely bad, terrain is mountainous, etc.
Note that the US rate is not worse than some other “civilized” places – Spain, Belgium, Japan, etc.
My understanding is that fatalities in accidents are linked to speed. Perhaps with more miles driven the average velocity is also higher?
Possibly because in most of the US driving is essential for almost every daily activity. So lots of people (young/old/incompetent) are forced to drive even though they probably shouldn’t.
When I commuted through Mexico City on a bike for two years (10,000km), I was grateful for the chaos. Mexico is known for the most congested traffic in the Western Hemisphere and that traffic is aggressive, densely packed, and slow. Slow was the most important because I could easily go around it or avoid it and the drivers were going too slow to smash into people over a large distance.
So I expect that the USA’s wide open highways and high speed traffic are a culprit in death and injury rates. The fast and free flowing traffic in a place like San Francisco or Boston is a hazard to life. (Yes, SF and Boston are largely congestion-free compared to Mexico City and Mexico City is not among the ten most congested cities in the world.)
Also, the form of streets matters. Neighborhood narrow streets, alleyways, one lane streets, and old-style suburban lanes so narrow you have to drive slowly to slalom between parked cars are all very safe. (Ten foot lanes alone make a street much safer http://www.citylab.com/design/2014/10/why-12-foot-traffic-lanes-are-disastrous-for-safety-and-must-be-replaced-now/381117/ .) Also, divided motorways with limited access and very wide 16+’ lanes are fairly safe. The most dangerous roads are suburban feeder streets with four to eight (or even ten) wide lanes. The left turns, constantly entering and leaving traffic, cross-streets with signals, and high speed of suburban commuters add up to enormous numbers of chances for things to go wrong and turn fatal very fast. Also twisty two- or three-lane rural mountain roads are dangerous. And those last two dangerous road types are the most common places to drive in the USA while Europe and Asia are full of narrow streets with a few motorways and few suburban streets.
I expect that forcing sixteen to twenty-year-olds to drive is also a major factor. Transit is outlawed in most American communities so young people must drive and their crash rates are much higher than adults’. DMV figures show that there is an age effect and no experience affect; adults getting their first motor vehicle licenses are not unsafe as novices.
Likewise, drunks and drug addicts are forced to drive by the absence of alternatives in the USA while in countries with first world infrastructure they could just ride the train.
I would add…. I saw a presentation 4-5 years ago from a Daimler-Chrysler engineer. Her pitch was that over the decade prior to that, passive safety elements (air bags, stiffer doors, better crumple zones) had dropped the fatality rate for US crashes significantly. And over the next decade, she expected that active safety elements- lane drift detection, obstacle detection and active braking, rollover detection and prevention, etc. were going to make the rate of crashes drop.
I’ve read that so far, the statistics are coming out that the active safety features are causing the otherwise same make and model of vehicle to differ in insurance claims. One report I read stated that damage claims were down something like 5%, and medical claims something like 50% for a particular vehicle- so few crashes were avoided, but automatic pre-braking and seat belt pre-tensioning was making a big difference in injuries. Can’t happen soon enough for me…..
In the US, there’s a marked diffence in fatality rates between rural (more) and urban locations.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811637.pdf
The licensing requirements in Europe (Germany, at least) are more stringent.
I suspect that rural drivers in the US are driving at higher speeds than drivers in Ireland (for example). I’m not sure but some/many of the rural roads in Ireland are very narrow.
In Britain, “A” roads are major roads and, some of them, are more like narrow secondary roads than the highways we have in the US.
Culture, policy and infrastructure. By the numbers, this should be the public health and civil rights cause of our time. streetsblog.org (not my site) covers these issues across the country.
Others have alluded to it, without really identifying the core issue: geography.
On B roads in Scotland (one-lane roads with too many sheep hazards), I once drove across the country in 90 minutes. Their A-roads are the equivalent of two-lane, paved rural roads. In comparison, I can’t cross Dallas and Fort Worth in 90 minutes on a highway.
The US is huge, and roads are much more flexible infrastructure than tracks. If you can put a car somewhere when you get there (not a problem in Texas, but seems to be a problem in the northeast and Europe), cars are really nice for toting a family and kids across a state or states. Much faster total transit time than trains, and cheaper than air. (Personally, I’d prefer to use a six-seat aircraft, but most people aren’t private pilots.)
Even intra-city, taxis, buses, and light rail are painfully slow for traveling anywhere beyond a dense city center, especially when you throw kids into the mix. And yes: that applies to Paris, London, and Tokyo.
Yes, higher speeds = higher risk of death. There is absolutely a tradeoff between transit time and safety. But we rejected lower rural speed limits in the 90s because of the sheer distances traveled. We didn’t see a major spike in rural traffic deaths as a result (but maybe the then-new airbags might have helped hold down fatality rates).
For a fairer comparision, you’d have to factor in miles driven per year per driver, and consider highway vs. non-highway, or maybe “low-speed urban”, “low-speed rural” and “highway”.
All that said, automated driving would be awesome for hour-upon-hour driving on Texas interstates.
The Strong Towns blog came out with their take on the same subject:
http://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2015/6/8/just-an-accident
I have no way of verifying this, but another factor than could potentially contribute, beyond the many already stated:
To the best of my knowledge, the US is one of the countries with greatest prevalence of automatic vs manual transmission. I don’t think than in european countries automatics constitute even 20% of the cars. Manual transmission requires more concentration and free hands to act. From my time in the US, I remember people doing everything in the cars while driving, from texting, to drinking coffee and eating, to shaving. While I doubt americans are as capable as any others of multitasking, automatic transmission helps these distraction prone behaviours.
Having taken driver training and the practical and written exams in both the US and France, I was astonished at how much more rigorous the process is in France. I can easily believe that makes some difference.