In the past, I had the opinion that due to individualism versus collectivism, US drivers tend to take things a lot more personally.
If you accidentally cut someone off or honk at them, US drivers feel it's a direct assault on them. I've witnessed and even personally encountered some scary road rage in the US, but never in China.
However, after finally having the chance to drive in New York, I realize that it's actually a city versus suburban driver/pedestrian culture.
I was quite amazed by how driving in New York City was so similar to driving in a Chinese city. Where it's more of a "dance" between cars, pedestrians, and other vehicles like bikes.
My experience tells me that is just a matter of scale and goes for a lot of "willingness to get confrontational". When $THE_SITUATION happens once every month you can initiate a fight or at least threaten, when that happens 4 times a day, you either stop or will be stopped.
Everything just sort of flowed around everything else, there was a cacophony of honking and shouting and cars/bikes just wedging in themselves where they wanted to go.
As someone from northern Europe, all of this just didn't make sense to me.
Yet somehow, I did not witness a single crash during the week I was there, not even a minor love tap.
Of course this is completely anecdotal, and I know India has a very high road fatality rate. But there is some reason to the chaos. When the infrastructure is lacking, people are surprisingly good at adapting and making things work on the fly.
Personally, I prefer the rules and predictability of western traffic, but it does tend to break down and confuse people when someone starts blatantly disregarding the rules. Indian/Chinese traffic is more adaptable, in a way.
Most US drivers, except for those in New York, are largely unaware of pedestrians, bikes, and motorcycles. I find it much more dangerous to ride a motorcycle in the US because so many drivers don't expect it and do things like turning right without looking behind them.
However, I do generally prefer driving in the US. The only issue I have is with the police. I'm much more scared of getting pulled over by a cop in the US due to some minor infraction, e.g. having a broke tail light, than I am of Chinese cops.
That sounds nice but the fact is more people per 100,000 are killed in China than the US.
China has about 2X per-capita road fatalities, and almost 10X per-vehicle fatalities as the US.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
Someone doing X being more likely to survive in China than the USA doesn’t mean the USA will have a higher fatality rate (since people just don’t do X there).
I'm curious about how you might have ever planned to back this weird argument up with evidence. Is there some secret repository of kids-playing-with-balls evidence that you were waiting to bust out? Or were you just going to try to first-principles it?
It just doesn’t happen in the USA, people aren’t prepared for it, which is well enough since the fatality rate is still low. It will happen in China if you spend a few week there.
In China drivers and pedestrians are both better and worse than those in the US. I found drivers and pedestrians both to be much more aware and had more agency about what they needed to to be safe.
Whereas in the US we assume a lot more that the rules of the road are going to be followed, and they are. In China you shouldn't assume that a given rule of the road is going to be adhered to, especially if there is any indication that it might not be (if that makes sense).
This results in the US looking a lot more ordered on the streets. But it also results in some situations in the US where it seems like people are brain dead. I personally prefer the US in this regard, but I was also raised in it.