Why are American roads so dangerous? | 爲什麼美國的公路如此危險? - FT中文網
登錄×
電子郵件/用戶名
密碼
記住我
請輸入郵箱和密碼進行綁定操作:
請輸入手機號碼,透過簡訊驗證(目前僅支援中國大陸地區的手機號):
請您閱讀我們的用戶註冊協議私隱權保護政策,點擊下方按鈕即視爲您接受。
FT英語電臺

Why are American roads so dangerous?
爲什麼美國的公路如此危險?

Bad driving is probably playing a bigger role in the fatality rate than larger cars and longer journeys
00:00

undefined

I have good news and bad news about America’s roads. The good news is the number of people killed in traffic collisions fell by almost 4 per cent in 2023. The bad news is the mortality rate on US roads is still 25 per cent up on a decade earlier, and three times the rate of the average developed country.

Most of the explanations commonly put forward for why US roads remain so deadly focus on broad structural factors such as vehicle size or time spent on the road, but a review of the evidence suggests this may be mistaken. Last year’s improvement is a case in point. Two reasons often cited as key causes of poor US performance both worsened: the total number of miles driven by Americans increased, and US cars continued to grow larger. Yet fatal collisions still declined.

undefined

Car-centrism in the US is clearly part of its road safety problem — it’s about culture more than geography. So committed are Americans to their cars that 63 per cent of people choose to drive for trips of less than a mile, compared with 16 per cent in the UK. But even after adjusting for distance driven, US fatality rates remain double the rich-world average. The main reasons American roads are so unsafe stem from how they drive, not how much.

On vehicle size, there is a wealth of evidence that larger cars are more deadly to pedestrians, but the contribution of America’s bloated fleet to its fatality rates turns out to be modest. US pedestrian deaths would be roughly 10 per cent lower if all SUVs and pick-up trucks were replaced with standard-sized cars, according to a study by Justin Tyndall, assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii.

Adding to the evidence that this is not a dominant factor, car sizes in Canada, Australia and New Zealand have traced similar paths to the US without resulting in a spike in fatalities.

undefined

Another theory is that the rise of homelessness in the US may be pushing pedestrian deaths higher. A recent study found that there had indeed been a marked rise in traffic-related deaths among the homeless, but this, too, can only explain a small portion of the overall rise.

Instead, an underrated factor seems to be not American cars but American drivers.

In an eye-opening analysis last year, Emily Badger, Ben Blatt and Josh Katz of The New York Times revealed that the rise in US road deaths was driven almost exclusively by pedestrian fatalities happening at dusk under fading light when drivers are most likely to be using their phones. A theory emerged that the proliferation of smartphones in a population who, unlike their European counterparts, almost exclusively drive cars with automatic transmission gives them a false sense of security about how dangerous it is to multitask at the wheel.

Yet this idea only half works. Using phones at the wheel is a big problem in the US, according to data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics. But just across the border, Canadians, who also drive automatics, spend less than half as much time using their devices while driving. The determining factor seems to be different attitudes to safety, with Americans twice as likely as Canadians or Europeans to say they find it acceptable to use a phone while driving.

undefined

The same pattern shows up in other behaviours. Americans are much less likely to wear seat belts than most Europeans and also have higher rates of drink-driving.

Given that studies find a lack of seat belts, alcohol and distracted driving all increase either the likelihood or lethality of a collision by a greater amount than vehicle size or shape — and that American drivers are more exceptional in these behaviours than in their car size — these factors may be the determining ones.

To be clear, driver habits don’t form in a vacuum, and they can and must change. As transport expert David Zipper points out, everything from the design of streets, to investment in public transport, to stricter — and enforced — laws on drinking, speeding, mobile phone usage and seatbelt-wearing has been proved to shape behaviour. This also shows up in the wide variation in road death trends between US states with more and less strict road safety laws.

Taking all the evidence together, America’s dire record on the roads is neither the result of happenstance nor industry-wide trends. If the US is to achieve developed-country levels of road safety, America and Americans need to change direction.

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch

版權聲明:本文版權歸FT中文網所有,未經允許任何單位或個人不得轉載,複製或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵權必究。

Thrive Capital:多樣化是給那些不知道自己在做什麼的人準備的

喬什•庫許納旗下的這家年輕的創投公司以大手筆投資OpenAI而聞名,顛覆了傳統的風險投資模式。它能得到真正的收益嗎?

誰要買Chrome?

關於儲蓄的思考。

將谷歌和Chrome瀏覽器分開是好辦法嗎?

呼籲這家搜尋巨擘剝離Chrome瀏覽器,會給用戶帶來他們顯然不想要的東西。

高成長並不能說明美國經濟的全貌

令人印象深刻的頭條數字對民主黨沒有幫助。

沒有學位也沒問題:美國僱主不再侷限於大學文憑

IBM、通用汽車和沃爾瑪等公司正專注於申請人的技能,而不是教育。

阿達尼醜聞將動搖印度股市替代中國的努力

就在幾個月前,印度股票被視爲全球投資者投資組合中中國股票的可行替代,但此次事件使人們重新關注當地股票的風險和高昂估值。
設置字型大小×
最小
較小
默認
較大
最大
分享×