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.
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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.
Yeah, this was really interesting. The big revelation is that in Europe, the vast majority of cars (80+% or something) are standard transmission, whereas in the US the vast majority (95+%) are automatic.
And the thing is...you can't use your cellphone while you're driving a manual.
Combine that with the relatively gigantic cars & trucks that Americans prefer, and you get a long way to explaining the huge gap in relative fatalities.
Of course...that doesn't explain why fatalities are more than twice as high in the US as in Canada (where automatic transmissions & trucks are similarly popular)
Well the obvious answer is that Canadians are just better than us lol
As a Canadian, I'd love to believe that. As someone who's recently driven in and out of Vancouver a bunch of times...I really don't.