> Are there actually other comparable countries in terms of the quantity of roads and the car & driving culture of the US?

Just north of the border in Canada?

> While U.S. road deaths rose 19 percent between 2010 and 2020, the Canadian figure fell at almost the same pace. That means that around 118 in every million Americans died in a crash in 2020, 2.5 times more than the 46 of every million Canadians who died in the same year.

* https://www.carscoops.com/2022/07/why-do-canadian-traffic-de...

> While US road deaths are skyrocketing (including the fastest increase on record in 2021), virtually all other developed countries have seen a decline. In France, for example, traffic fatalities are now just a third of the US per capita rate. As Urban Institute researcher Yonah Freemark recently told me, 30 years ago the streets of France were more dangerous than those in the US, but “today the average French person is 40% safer than the average American.”

> It might seem easy to dismiss transportation comparisons between the US and France, a country smaller than the state of Texas where many streets were designed centuries before the automobile arrived. But what about looking at a North American cousin — Canada, a sprawling, car-oriented nation whose cities are comparably young and similarly configured?

* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-01/why-canad...

Canada has more deaths per mile driven at 5.1, than the US at 1.5.

https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/motor-vehicle/historical-fatalit...

Your other comment about “accidents and deaths per mile driven.” is likely the right metric of the idea I was trying to convey!

Canada is 5.1 deaths per billion km.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic...

USA is 1.5 deaths per 100 million miles from your link. That's about 9.3 deaths per billion km.

Other comparable countries would be Australia and New Zealand which have 5.2 and 7.2 deaths per billion km respectively.

USA is still well behind on that metric.

The entirety of Canada has the population similar to that of California -- a single US state. Probably has the road miles equivalent of the western United States.

Other countries are comparable in being rich and having safe cars. I don’t know what your experience abroad was like but plenty of developed countries do not have sufficient infrastructure for people to avoid cars. In Western Europe, for example you’ll find car ownership is high except for the cities where it is not necessary, much like you’ll find that car ownership is high in America outside of (central) New York and a few other places.[1]

One big difference is Americans tend to drive bigger heavier cars that perform poorly in collisions. I am not confident about other differences (rates of texting, drink driving, road design, etc). A commonly made claim is that Americans drive more. This is true[2] but I don’t think the degree is high enough to explain the difference, though there are lots of things one could say are lost in that data.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1013213/passenger-kilome... (remember to divide by population) or https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm (very old!)

Pedantic point. Central New York, is the area around Syracuse, NY. I think you mean Manhattan + Bronx + downtown Brooklyn in New York City when you say (Central) New York.

There was a recent story about how big trucks in the US don't have basic safety features seen in say Europe like stopping cars from ending up under them.