The difference is not only the scale of things but especially that a war is caused by people, on purpose, too often with the consent of their population.

Car accidents are exactly that, accidents.

The vast majority of car "accidents" (more properly collisions) are the predictable result of policy choices.

What policy change could possibly be made to make people better drivers?

I imagine there are several.

American driver education and testing are notoriously lax compared to much of the world; make driver testing more intensive and frequent.

Traffic enforcement is geared more towards municipal income generation and the facilitating of searches and arrests for other crimes than toward ensuring safe driving; stop pulling over poor people to search for drugs and start photographing and billing middle class and rich people for speeding or for idling in the middle/passing lane.

Car manufacturers jack up the price on critical safety features and make it difficult to retrofit them into existing vehicles; regulate them.

Our roadways are often designed poorly, mixing use cases in ways that result in unnecessary injury (e.g., "stroads" and intersections with poor pedestrian design); regulate and fix those.

What's a stroad?

I tried writing an answer, realized I suck at that, and so am providing a link that answers the question better than I can:

https://www.bikede.org/2011/11/28/we-have-too-many-stroads/

The takeaway is that streets and roads have different goals, and when that's not acknowledged we wind up with the misery that is driving in US towns.

A combination between a street and a road.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-01-07/defining-...

Take care driving as serious as aviation. Mandatory dash cams to make it easier to assign blame, automatic sensors which alert police when they detect the driver is behaving erratically. Make it easy to report other drivers for bad behavior (sitting on someone else's bumper, brake checking them, cutting them off, jersey lane swapping) which results in mandatory training or points off their license.

This is the only response I have seen to my question that could maybe change things - specifically having automatic sensors in every vehicle that automatically alert police when you do something dangerous. I think this would be unrealistic to implement, but assuming you could, it would probably help (assuming sensor data could be used as proof of bad driving).

As for reporting bad driving, you really need proof of a person's bad driving if you're going to penalize them for it. Having more traffic cameras helps a bit, but people just learn where the cameras are and drive carefully when they know they are being filmed.

Your tone suggests you can't imagine any, which is... surprising. There are a vast array of things you can do to make driving safer, at the cost of making it less accessible and/or more expensive. Different countries already set their threshold differently - in the US, a driving test takes 20 minutes and everyone passes, while in the UK it takes 40 minutes and most people fail the first time. And lo and behold, 4 times fewer accidents per capita in the UK - despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.

I guess I didn't ask the right question here. My issue is with the statement "the vast majority of accidents are due to bad policy". I would disagree with this statement. Some people occasionally make bad decisions when they drive or get distracted and cause accidents. How do you create a policy to keep people from occasionally getting distracted or making a risky choice. You can't. Most people who are driving in a risky manner know how to drive safely, know that their behavior is not appropriate and they do it anyway because they don't care or think they can get away with it. Almost every person I have met who is a bad driver says something like "it's a risk I'm willing to take" or "I know the risks" without any thought about the fact that their behavior is putting others at risk as well. The only thing that usually changes these people's behavior is getting in an accident, at which point you just hope they didn't injure someone else too badly. Even then, I know of people who have been in accidents who still drive horribly. I'm convinced the problems are more cultural than anything else.

People are people everywhere, I'm sure plenty of drivers in e.g. Sweden get distracted or make bad choices - indeed Swedish road design policy is that road design should explicitly accommodate that. "Culture" is a lazy non-explanation, and wouldn't explain why e.g. the Netherlands had similarly high collision rates in the 1970s, but now doesn't - not because their culture is less American now (at least, I can't see how such a claim is at all defensible), but because of deliberate policy changes.

You can't prevent all distraction or all bad choices, but you can reduce collision rates by at least a factor of 20 or so with the right policy choices - we know because these other countries have done it. So I think it's fair to say that the majority of collisions are caused by not making those policy choices.

So you are saying Americans are just worse drivers? America has more car accidents per capita than similarly dense countries with different policies. One policy is to make public transit better, that reduces accidents a lot since it gets people off the roads. Another policy is stricter tests as talked about above. The end result is way less accidents entirely thanks to policies.

> despite narrower roads and overwhelmingly manual transmissions.

You say this like you'd expect manual transmissions to increase the accident rates? If anything I'd suspect the opposite - much harder to be distracted on your phone, eating food, etc when you need both hands to be able to drive. It also keeps your mind more engaged if you're shifting gears all the time (obviously doesn't apply to highway driving where you can sit in the same gear for miles on end but at least my intuition tells me the highway isn't where most accidents occur).

> You say this like you'd expect manual transmissions to increase the accident rates?

I agree with you! But manual transmissions don't necessarily work as you'd assume - my brother at 18 could text or have a soda and shift at the same time. Similarly, we can end up at our destinations without remembering exactly all the steps - it's become automatic.

That said, most people feel there's less need for following distance when it's an automatic - that's what I consider a bad and dangerous habit.

> That said, most people feel there's less need for following distance when it's an automatic - that's what I consider a bad and dangerous habit.

That's an interesting way to phrase it so I'm curious what you mean. I have long thought that it would be nice if more people drove manual because then they would try and regulate their speed a bit more to minimize shifts, eg in stop and go traffic I'd prefer going 3 miles/hour for 20 seconds than 10 miles/hour but fully stopping every 2 car lengths, or when you see a red light ahead, most people stay their current speed and then stop quickly rather than slowing in order for it to change to green before they have to fully stop.

Is that the concept you're getting at with the following distance thing (since longer following distance gives more room to keep a consistent speed) or are you getting at something else?

I think we assume the same thing, but use different examples. Were manual transmissions more common, people would presumably try to minimize shifting.

My example (major gripe) is city driving. Coasting instead of actually stopping (as you come up on a line of cars at a light that just turned green) means you minimize shifting, but it requires a buffer of a couple dozen meters. It just isn't possible when you're too close.

Increase the testing requirements for new drivers to make it harder to get a license, for starters. Or make it easier to suspend people's licenses for acts of unsafe driving.

America has extremely low requirements to get licensed as a driver; this is intentional. We wanted everyone out of public transit and into cars. In other countries it's far more difficult to get licensed to drive, you're expected to have more skills. Hell, most drivers in Europe drive stick because you're required to test on a manual transmission.

Much stricter requirements for getting (and keeping) your drivers license. Policies focusing on reducing drunk driving (both focusing changing attitudes, increasing the risk of getting caught and increasing the punishments for people caught). More consistent and continuous enforcement of existing driving laws. You can probably do more to get unsafe cars off the roads. There is a lot you can do around designing roads and traffic flows in ways that reduce the risk of accidents.

Middle of the road separation barriers.

Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads.

Roundabouts instead of crossings and traffic lights. (Roundabouts force the drivers to slow down. And on average, saves time I think)

More trains, buses, subways.

> Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads.

That actually leads to more collisions at intersections.

The reason that sidewalks work for pedestrians is because they move at walking speed. That means its easy for drivers to see them approaching an intersection (since they're a short distance away).

Cyclists, on the other hand, move far faster than a walking pedestrian and can be much further away from the intersection where a motorist isn't looking and still can end up in a collision.

The best policy is to have cyclists integrate with vehicular traffic, because cyclists are vehicles, just like motorcyclists.

Cycles can't as a general rule keep up with cars, unlike motorcycles. There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway.

Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing. I've seen some designs that make sense - it's rather interesting actually what nuances go into safe intersection design. I don't have any links available offhand though.

> There's no integrating them with auto traffic whether or not you force them into the same roadway.

Roads can accommodate traffic moving at different speeds. For example, buses and trucks consistently move slower than passenger vehicles, especially up grades, but drivers of faster vehicles simply change lanes to pass them. This works on interstates where drivers of passenger vehicles are going 70 to 90 mph and commercial vehicles are going 40 to 60 mph.

Similarly, on a surface street with traffic moving anywhere from 0 to 40 mph, cyclists moving 0 to 20 mph can similarly integrate with traffic with faster drivers changing lanes to pass them.

> Part of good separate path design is planning the intersections to prevent the sort of crashes you're describing.

I've read about the designs, but the assumptions that they make do not really hold. For example, the typical "protected" intersection with curb extensions and an offset assumes that a motorist will look down the bike path to check for cyclists before exiting an intersection while moving at 10 mph. In reality, drivers aren't going to do that.

As I noted earlier, this principle works with pedestrians, because, while walking, they're moving around 5 feet per second, so seeing a pedestrian 10 feet away from the intersection is pretty easy for a driver making a turn since they really don't have to look down the sidewalk.

In contrast, a cyclist is moving anywhere from 15 to 30 feet per second. A cyclist that's two seconds away from entering an intersection can be anywhere from 30 to 60 feet away. This requires a drivers to actually look down the bike path, which isn't always going to occur. The cyclist may assume that the turning driver has seen them, but that assumption is in correct, and the cyclist will have to slow rapidly to avoid a collision.

Also, a lot of cyclists, when making use of such infrastructure, believe that they have pedestrian style right of way, meaning that they will do things like ride around the front of a turning vehicle believing that they'll stop to avoid a collision instead of just yielding.

A typical person takes about a second or so to react to something unexpected. At 10 mph, the motorist has already covered 16 feet, meaning that they would collide with a cyclist before they have a chance to even press the brake pedal.

I do sometimes wonder why Americans learn how to drive before they learn how to drink.

Stricter driving tests is the obvious one.

Public transit and grade-separated bike lanes.

Car accidents are caused by people, by a system kept in place on purpose, and most the population is made dependent on them in many countries, in that there is no choice but to make oneself at risk of a car "accident".

But the deadly acts in war are meant to be deadly, meant to kill people. Most people aren’t trying to kill others even if they’re essentially forced to drive in a car-centric society. The killing is almost always accidental and unintended.

There's a part of me that that thinks there are no accidents. Yes--that whole Freud thing.

As I have aged, I do think their are accidents, and life is a gamble. It has always bothered me the rich can afford to take chances, but that's another story.

I still think it's best to think you can control your fate with most acccidents though.

In high school, and college, I drove without insurance. (California used to require auto insurance, but didn't mandate it at DMV. I honestly couldn't afford it.)

I used to think of driving as walking on a cliff's edge. You just don't make a mistake. It did work, but I probally got very lucky too.

> Car accidents are exactly that, accidents.

I disagree.

With car design, function and ownership as they are, we (the people) accept that there is an uncommonly high risk of a crash and serious injury to ourselves and to the general public.

We only call it an "accident" to abrogate that responsibility.

On the point about scale: some wikipedia browsing suggests road traffic deaths currently kill about 10 times as many people as wars, globally.

You could argue that anything is an accident. Can you stop a war after it starts? Hardly. Can you stop a war before it starts? Hardly. Same as for car accidents. You could be smart and attentive, foster an environment unsupportive of accidents, but in the end we're not conscious enough to exert such control.