There are a lot of personal preferences we regulate away. I prefer to drive drunk home from the bar, but that's illegal. I prefer to build buildings without obeying fire safety building codes, but apparently that's also illegal.

30k / year die in car accidents in the USA. This is a real problem with a huge human toll, akin to drunk driving or building codes.

Step 1 is slow the vehicles down. As soon as they slow down, one of the main drivers of size - fear of an accident with a bigger vehicle - will be greatly decreased and we can do step 2: shrink them.

> Step 1 is slow the vehicles down

I can't even imagine what that would do to traffic that is already pretty congested. Large swaths of suburban metros would just grind to a halt.

> 30k / year die in car accidents in the USA

Closer to 40K. Even then, that is compared with almost 3 million people who die for all reasons combined. It's actually sort of amazing how low the fatality rate is given just how much movement there is every day. One for every 100,000,000 miles driven. That's remarkable.

Slower speeds means cars drive closer together which means throughput increases (to a point). I think around 60km/h is generally considered the speed which yields the biggest throughput of cars.

I think we need to change our language a bit and stop referring to crashes as accidents.

Crashes are common. Accidents are exceptionally rare. While "accident" is a statement of intent, and outside of extreme road rage scenarios, nobody intends to cause a crash, people do deliberately create dangerous situations that lead to crashes.

You might not have intended to rear-end somebody, but you did choose to text while driving.

You might not have intended to side-swipe somebody, but you did choose to not check your blind spot before changing lanes.

The word "accident" implies a mistake that you couldn't see coming. But when someone chooses to create the dangerous situation, it's no longer an accident, because the situation could have been avoided entirely.

You are also right driving has never been safer. But you could have said that before airbags or abs or even seatbelts.

and fyi, interstate driving is dangerous:

> the fatality rate per 100 million miles traveled in 2015 was still 2.6 times higher in rural areas than in urban areas (1.84 in rural areas compared with 0.71 in urban areas)

https://www.tariolaw.com/fatal-car-crashes-urban-car-acciden...