"The pandemic years weren’t outliers, though. Pedestrian fatalities have been on the rise for more than a decade. Increasingly, the United States stands alone, with an overall traffic fatality rate that’s 50 percent higher than comparable nations in Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. According to the Urban Institute, Americans are now almost three times more likely to die in a car crash than their counterparts in France."
Before you blame cell phones, note that other countries also have cell phones.
It's pretty obvious for anyone who has traveled and driven in other countries that drivers in the US are utterly terrible. We have effectively no licensing standards, and effectively no enforcement of basic safe driving practices. The only thing that's generally enforced in the US is speed limits, and this is only done for revenue purposes, especially since most speed limits in the US are set artificially low to help local authorities meet their budget.
It's both possible that the US is uniquely worse and that the same sort of unfair and senseless outcomes are not only possible but happen in other countries. The fact the US is worse doesn't actually change the point of the person you're responding to.
I could write a much better indictment of driving in the US than pointing to a single random occurrence and actually talk about the completely fucked way people drive here on a daily basis. That said, the same basic reason why things are the way they are won't change for the outcome of my screed, as it is a simple matter that the US is so heavily car-centric as a society that it is impossible for the average person to participate in daily life without driving and therefore it's seen as unnecessarily punitive to restrict people's driving privileges except in the most egregious circumstances (and often not even then). We'd have to massively change the attitude towards cars in the US to effectively change anything about our current situation to make it possible to enforce reasonable standards of driving skill.
I think US's car fatality problem stems from the "driving classes" you take at 16 for one day to become a driver. You don't really learn to deal with all possible scenarios doing 3 left turns and parking. There's 2 other big reasons the roads are unsafe due to the states just not taking care of their own roads. The other reason is the popularity of bigger SUVs and trucks. 90% of big vehicle owners feel safer due to the weight of their vehicle as if they truly intend to total anyone else's vehicle that they hit. When I was in Europe I noticed cars are a lot more popular than SUVs or trucks. Getting in an accident with 2 cars is a lot less destructive than a 4,000 lb car hitting a 6,000 lb truck or SUV.
For pedestrian deaths, there's been a decoupling between the US and the rest of the developed world in recent years.
https://www.vox.com/culture/23496462/crisis-american-roads-p...
"The pandemic years weren’t outliers, though. Pedestrian fatalities have been on the rise for more than a decade. Increasingly, the United States stands alone, with an overall traffic fatality rate that’s 50 percent higher than comparable nations in Western Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia. According to the Urban Institute, Americans are now almost three times more likely to die in a car crash than their counterparts in France."
Before you blame cell phones, note that other countries also have cell phones.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...