Pretty much this is the cause (alongside the steady increase in SUV use). We need the opposite trend and slow traffic to induce a reduction in injuries and deaths.
How about reversing those trends?
How? Americans clearly want huge SUVs, and want to drive them very, very fast, and act like any effort to restrict these from them are attacks on their "freedoms". They even think it's an attack on their freedom if they have to pay for parking or for driving on a road.
People definitely don’t like the high costs. And I’m not sure how much they love the really big ones, only the smaller.
They’d live the better fuel economy of smaller vehicles. They hated SUVs at first and had to be convinced by years and years of ads and product placement.
Yes some tiny part of the populace will freak out about their rights to 20ft tall SUVs. Let them have them, just put an insane tax on them to cover the horrific externalities.
No one likes new cars pushing $40k. Sitting in an SUV and seeing the hood of the truck next to you is over your head.
Some people didn’t want seatbelts. Or airbags. Or helmets on motorcycles. It’s ok to move forward anyway.
Car drivers are forced to drive 20 MPH near schools during school opening and closing times. In tourist districts pedestrian safety and accessibility is favored over being able to drive an SUV 40 MPH down a street. In neighborhoods filled with relatively politically empowered people, roads are never straight to discourage speed, speed bumps are added, stop signs are added, and there can even be focused police traffic enforcement.
If an area has an 8 lane wide stroad with a 45 MPH speed limit then it's implied that the lives of drivers speeding through are valued over those who live in the neighborhood.
Both anecdotally and statistically you see this all over the country, just since 2019 -- a very quick change over a very short time. So it seems strange to even think about any other cause, even if in general they are relevant -- those are just much slower acting things than the sudden impact of the pandemic.
We actually had road harms down or at least flattish until then.
The pandemic and anti-social behaviour is not the cause. American people are not unique, but the built form of their cities and the type of cars they drive is. That is more likely the cause.
Like making cars less deadly. Cutting down the number of trips. Thus my comment.
The expectation that you are your work, and you're always busy, seems to have given permission for people to be like,"My life is out of control so I will be too".
Goes hand in hand with the society not being for the care of people but for the care of bank accounts, gripe about the way they were doing capitalism these days. Setting people's wants higher and higher while simultaneously continuing down the path of stratifying society into permanent lower income class.
