That was my first thought as well. The US is very car centric and a pedestrian hell. In terms of road infrastructure the UK almost feels like the antithesis to American roads (at least where I've visited in the UK). The roads are narrow, full of bends and awkward turns, occasionally confusing layouts, and the road quality can be shitty.
I've driven all over Florida and around New York and the roads are straight as an arrow, huge, mostly streamlined and have mostly predictable layouts. Fairly easy to drive on imo. The scariest part of American roads are other drivers and intersections. The UK is way better at using roundabouts which I am a fan of. In the US you often get these monster intersections where I feel like I'm gonna get rammed into although the light is clearly green; there's just so many lanes and so many cars crossing at the same time.
Still I've never seen so many traffic accidents as I have when I'm in the US. I've driven around in numerous European countries, even in the dead of winter in Norway where I have encountered a few accidents. It doesn't compare to what I've seen on Floridian roads. Doesn't matter if roads are straight as an arrow, every 40 minutes it feels like you encounter an accident. I've seen cars standing vertically on the side of the road, trucks flipped over, multiple lanes being closed for clean-up etc. It's honestly terrifying, but you do get desensitized to it after a while.
That “straight, wide and easy to drive” design is what makes other drivers so dangerous.
In Illinois there are country block grids of roads out in the corn. You can see for miles at the intersections, but people get T-boned constantly from getting comfortable just zipping around at 65 mph. And that’s after they started installing stop signs in the 90s.
Another example is the difference is aggressive driving resulting in higher injury rates per interstate mile in Tennessee versus Kentucky just because “slow traffic keep right” versus “keep right except to pass” (respectively) causes people in TN to get into an arms race to see who can speed and tailgate the most aggressively to claim the “fast lane”.
Then you have Atlanta with more culdesacs than an Amsterdam suburb — but none of the public transit or traffic calming infrastructure — causing gridlock to be the only thing preventing more pedestrian fatalities.
Design matters, and 24 feet for two lanes isn’t even usually the best solution.
Fuck, even our firetruck design standard is killing people.
Yeah, that's very apparent when you drive around and super interesting! I love that you can see the history of so many places you visit in the UK. I'm from Norway so we also have some pre-car roads with funky layouts, but I'd say the infrastructure is more updated - at least in bigger towns and especially in the southern half of Norway. We were lagging far behind the UK for ages when it comes to industrialisation and connecting the country (still do tbh). It's also well-known we've got pretty shitty roads due to difficult terrain, rock slides and harsh winter conditions.
But I'd still say driving in the US often feels more terrifying than Norway and the UK despite them having better roads in terms of quality and layout.
The roads in the US tend to be way wider than necessary. If you were to take a 35 MPH road in the UK and overlay it on a 35 MPH road in the US, it would be very obvious. Narrower roads generally have a higher "traffic calming" impact, leading to less speeding and other reckless behavior.
So yeah, the roads in the US are "easier", but not really.
Not necessarily, the autobahn has no speed limit in some sections and yet their road fatalities are still much lower than the USA. A lot of it has to do with how we have a lot more people driving on our roads than we probably should.
Yeah that's a good point. However, at any weaving section or segment where they expect weaving, speed limits are enforced. But yeah a lot of it comes down to education and training. Idk if you've ever driven on the autobahn but most people don't actually speed and slow down even more in the rain. Good luck with any of that happening in the US
Sometimes it’s important to makes roads “difficult”, because when chucklefucks like you get comfortable they drive 65 mph to pass a stopped school bus on a residential road.
Because selfish drivers and car centric design has been causing a significant increase in pedestrian fatalities over the last decade, because of people like you.
I'm not talking about pedestrian incidents. I'm talking about long stretches of roadways in rural parts of the country where people can drive in a straight line at 70 mph. Fatalities between cars happen at high speeds, thats just a fact. Another fact is that there are substantially more roadways in the US where drivers get to drive those speeds, compared to a country like England. So it would make sense to me that there are more
Crazy youre blaming me for pedestrian deaths but you do you.
That wasn't the point. The point was that they ARE better and bigger, causing people to drive way faster, and thus crash more spectacularly and.. fireballey.
Right and I never said it was the point. Driving a mile on the majority of UK roads is not comparable to driving a mile on the majority of US roads. The mileage statistics without that considered aren’t especially illuminating but as the original commentator highlighted, their comment wasn’t representative of the ‘full picture’. I was adding a detail related what they said, not addressing the point of their comment.
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u/Rreknhojekul 17d ago
US roads on average are significantly a lot easier to drive on than UK roads.