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@TechConnectify I strongly feel you're ignoring a more important pillar than any individual driver's behavior including vehicle preferences: negligent US civil engineering standards.

There is also an arms race in suburban development leading to more artillery roads that are quantifiably the most dangerous places for pedestrians. I suspect that if you could control for other variables, you'd see the biggest correlation between ped fatalities and increasing volumes of people moving on this style of road.

I literally had a conversation with a PE and professor of transportation engineering from my city last week in which he started talking about how a bunch of roads in our town needed to be widened because they were unsafe. He couldn't see well at intersections and it made it hard to proceed. I pointed out to him that the city's vision zero stats showed that the narrow road he was talking about didn't have any incidents and that widened roads increase speed and thus incident rate -- that it was the wider roads where all the collisions were occurring. That widening the road would directly increase speed and probably kill people, and that the current design was probably safer. And he was really offended that I questioned him, and just started talking about design codes and the MUD.

I do think cars are too big. For so many reason.

I also think drivers behave poorly. But I think the drivers who behave most poorly are less likely to drive outside of the US because they have better transportation standards. The ones who want to live on their phones all day can do so from a train or bus in most of the world but are pushed behind the wheel in the US.

But above all else, I think the way the MUDCT tells US road designers to design roads is fundamentally unsafe, and that the worst designs are growing most quickly. That's the real story.

@TechConnectify
No assumption intended. "Ignore" is probably a word that implies a value judgment and that was not my intention, so apologies if it came off that way. My point is that I don't think either vehicle size nor distraction is going to be the most important covariate for US road danger. The way we build the streets is, and there's a straight line on this style of urbanism that pushes us to worse situations that these other things exacerbate.

For example, huge vehicles would be uncomfortable and less likely to be a preference for drivers if we didn't also intentionally push for huge roads and giant parking spaces. If it was at all inconvenient to have a huge vehicle, I think a lot of people would be dissuaded from them.

And, to repeat myself, having flashy distractions for your drivers is way more likely in a country where everyone is forced to drive than in one where there's a viable choice not to. If you really just want to be on your phone doing social media during your commute, it's much more comfortable to do so on a bus, train, or even walking, and so I genuinely think a lot of the "worst" drivers in the US would simply not be drivers living somewhere else.