A few days ago comrade /u/InevitableSwing posted an astounding graph of automobile deaths per capita in different countries.
Obviously America was number one by far 
but what was amazing to me was that Canada’s rate is nearly three times lower.
The countries are not that different in many ways 
.
Certainly things like aggressive driving and speed limits of course play a role, but I think the key is probably something a lot more simple: public fucking transit usage.
Example A:
USA
- Own car/drive: 85%
- Public transit: 12%
- Bike: 11%
Example B:
Canada
- Own car/drive: 67%
- Public transit: 23%
- Bike: 11%
So overall 18% fewer Canadians drive, and nearly twice as many take pubic transit.
A lot of our population is centred around the major cities that have decent public transit, and even some of the medium sized cities have decent bus systems too.
- Toronto
- Montreal
- Vancouver
The truth is that Canada just has better public transit than the U.S. on the whole. Every major city has some kind of rapid transit, and buses are more frequent too.
I also feel like in USA there is a stigma around public transit usage. Like it’s “dirty” and “for the poors”.
I’ve only ever lived in BC so I can’t speak for everywhere but I don’t think those attitudes are nearly as prevalent here as they are down South.
Yeah it’s a stigma. I’ve been at dinners with family and I’ll get asked why I don’t drive, like there’s something wrong with me.
But really it comes down to most cities just not being built for it. No one bats an eye if you don’t drive in NYC for example. Most other places in the US aren’t like that at all though.
Not denying that, but even if you correct for that, the number of traffic deaths is still way off for the USA. There is probably something about how, what, where or when Amerikans drive that factors heavily into the number of traffic deaths. And it’s not just how pervasive car brain makes automobile usage, in the original graph you’ll see that an absurdly carbrained country like Germany has even lower numbers than Canada for annual deaths.
In the case of Germany, i can say that this hasn’t always been the case and that traffic planning plays at least some part in that. City planners here actually take a look at places where accidents happen a lot and try to find out what’s going on there and how to fix it. That can mean a change in confusing or lacking road signage, removing obstacles that block sight of intersections, repairing dangerous road conditions, installing roundabouts or traffic lights or enforcing speed limits with fixed radar traps.
Another major factor could be how safety precautions are treated. It’s an incredibly Amerikan thing to use these things that bypass seatbelt warners. Seatbelts have massively reduced the number of traffic deaths when they became mandatory.
Then there’s the issue of Amerikans driving “cars” that have worse pedestrian visibility than a literal tank, crush everything they touch into a fine red mist, and are also prone to flip over when they swerve off the road.
Also, Amerikan infrastructure makes accidents between cars and cyclists or pedestrians incredibly likely.
Except Winnipeg for some reason. Wonder what’s up there? They have BRT but that’s not enough for a city of over 700,000.
I completely agree with you, and on a related note the almost uniformly higher rates of transit usage in Canada compared to the US (with the exception of the massive anomaly that is NYC) is an interesting source for discussion, and one which cannot be explained by disparities in urban transit infrastructure alone.
That almost all Canadian cities have a rapid transit system of some kind certainly helps their numbers, but even cities in the US with considerably better systems, by most metrics, tend to underperform their Canadian peers. For instance, in 2016 the Canadian capital of Ottawa (a massive city filled with suburbs and rural towns, which then had no rail system whatsoever, and whose slow, unreliable, and infrequent buses are a constant source of complaint) had a higher transit modal share than Washington DC or Chicago, both mostly dense urban cores with extensive heavy rail metros.
I was about to type up an entire essay on the topic, but to be brief I see the cause of Canada’s relatively more transit oriented populace to come down to the fact that White flight/suburbanization didn’t happen to quite the same extent there (the reasons for which you could write a book on). Something which ensured that downtowns remained hubs of jobs and people, rather than wastelands of parking lots. Simultaneously, because urban centres weren’t imagined as places of a terrifying racialized other, to quite the same extent as in the US, transit was not demonized as much and middle-class Canadians were consequently more willing to allow themselves (and their children) to use it.
I mean, did Canada have a significant ethnic minority that people were afraid of the same extend that white america feared black/brown america? A lot harder to do white flight if the people who remain in the cities are also white. The only real ethnic conflict in Canada in the immediate post war period was between the French Canadians and the majority Anglo Canadians, and even the palest englishman is not really all that afraid of a french guy.
Obviously not correcting you, just wondering if my explanation makes sense, since Canadian history isn’t really a thing that people can passively pick up for the most part.
The US is a failed experiment in neoliberal governance. We are a state in the process of collapsing. All of our institutions are corrupt and dysfunctional. Our infrastructure is falling apart due to underinvestment.
living in the United 𐌔𐌔naKKKes turns people into bloodthirsty gammons
I’d add Calgary to the “decent transit” list. Unless you’re trying to visit a friend in some distant suburb, it’s actually relatively easy (by Canadian standards) to get around the city regularly without a car.
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18% fewer drivers can’t explain much of a 3x gap in deaths from car crashes.
I think if you wanted a real answer, you’d have to go dig into the statistics for types and causes of car crashes.
