The cause was easy enough to identify: Data parsed by Kuhls and her colleagues showed that drivers were speeding more, on highways and on surface streets, and plowing through intersections with an alarming frequency. Conversely, seatbelt use was down, resulting in thousands of injuries to unrestrained drivers and passengers. After a decade of steady decline, intoxicated-driving arrests had rebounded to near historic highs.
… The relationship between car size and injury rates is still being studied, but early research on the American appetite for horizon-blotting machinery points in precisely the direction you’d expect: The bigger the vehicle, the less visibility it affords, and the more destruction it can wreak.
Probably only about 10% of the problem, and not a great explanation for why fatality rates jumped well after smartphones were widely adopted.
Maybe American drivers were always shitty, but their increasing size makes them more fatal
Combination of drivers getting worse, lower seatbelt use, and bigger vehicles, as I tried to summarize at the top.
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How do you figure? I remember reading somewhere that using a phone while driving is worse than driving drunk, and I see people using their phones on the freeway, every day.
I could see the delay being caused by the rise of ubiquitous social media or something. For the first few years, there just weren’t as many reasons to be checking your phone in the car. And there’s the intersection of distracted driving with bigger vehicles.