> I didn't know this, but it is absolutely crazy.

It's crazy because the numbers don't line up with the theory. If you look at US traffic deaths by year, they were basically flat in terms of vehicle miles traveled between 2010 and 2019 and then took a big jump from COVID which is only now starting to come back down.

Meanwhile in Europe road fatalities were also fairly flat up until 2019, and then went down significantly from COVID.

Now we have to guess why the responses to COVID had the opposite effect in each place, but it's pretty obvious that the difference was a primarily result of COVID rather than differences in vehicle safety regulations, unless the vehicle safety regulations all changed in 2020 and everyone immediately replaced the installed base of cars everywhere overnight.

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XCabbage 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

2020 wasn't just the start of Covid, but also the start of BLM. The narrative I always see from the American right is that BLM caused many police forces across the US to radically reduce traffic enforcement, since: 1. traffic offenders are disproportionately black, 2. stops for minor traffic offences can sometimes spiral into violence in various ways, and some viral ones have involved absurdly bad use of force decisions by officers involved, and 3. no force wants to take the blame for another George Floyd

Per this narrative, a significant antisocial tranche of the public has responded to the effective suspension of traffic law in the way that you would expect them to, and that is why road deaths are up.

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energy123 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why do you think COVID is relevant aside from being a placeholder for the year 2020?

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AnthonyMouse an hour ago | parent | next [-]

COVID happened in the year of the discontinuity and caused major changes to commuting behavior as a result of remote work, people afraid of infection avoided mass transit, many people moved out of cities or lost their jobs, people bought cars who didn't used to drive and now there are more new/inexperienced drivers with cars (and it's easier to get a license in the US than Europe), etc.

Also, the numbers for at least the US are apparently just wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

1.27 fatalities per 100M VMT in 2023 (the latest year with data), 1.11 in 2010, that's a difference of 14%, not 30%. Even the peak during COVID was only 24% above 2010. The only way I can see to get 30% is to use the during-COVID number for only the total number of motor vehicle fatalities without accounting for population growth or vehicle miles traveled, which is not a great metric for making comparisons.

	▲	XCabbage 26 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The 30% figure is "correct" if you look at the absolute number of deaths instead of deaths per VMT. But I basically agree with you; that clearly the wrong stat to cite if you are attributing the change to vehicle safety regulations.

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esseph 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Because a lot of people stopped driving and leaving their home so much during that time.

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crimsoneer an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Cybertrucks init (/s)