I remember reading years back that Mississippi is the only state where it’s legal for the driver to drink and drive (as long as they keep it below 0.08). Multiple defenders on Reddit said its safe because its still below the legal limit.
Couldnt be related, could it? Nahhh
https://dui.drivinglaws.org/resources/can-a-passenger-drink-alcohol.htm
I don’t know much about Mississippi, but I know that in neighboring Louisiana, there are drive-through daiquiri places.
the fine print of the law says that the open container law is not applicable to containers with frozen alcoholic beverage where the lid is intact and no straw is protruding through the lid.
In most cases, daiquiris adhere to the “tape rule.” Most daiquiri shops will put a piece of tape over the straw hold on the lid. If this tape is removed or broken then the drink is considered an open container.
So a piece of tape counts as a “seal.” They’re not even trying.
Ah yes, a piece of tape. Tape can definitely not be lifted and replaced, right?
I took a quick looks and seems like Mississippi has many drive through daiquiris bars also.
https://m.yelp.com/search?cflt=drivethrubars&find_loc=Gulfport%2C+MS
getting a drivers license in mississippi is basically show up to the DMV, suck a cock and drive home or what?
Mississippi has drive-through combo shops: liquor store / DMV / KFC.
Saves time on your way to and home from church.
Victoria is that low cos they don’t fuck around when it comes to driving fines. The speed limit means limit, and they’re cracking down hard on drivers using phones.
Victorians are some of the worst/dangerous drivers I’ve seen, but I’m not in Victoria.
I have seen worse but yeah, we have more than our fair share of dickheads on the road.
I mean,Australia has way less snow than the US, that definitely has to account for a chunk of the difference in our numbers.
from existing in a car in the US on a few occasions and living in australia i’d wager a HUGE amount of the difference is attitude… holy SHIT do yall speed like crazy! 15-20mph over the limit just seems to be standard… 15kph over the limit here in aus you literally watch them pass every other car and call them a dickhead - and they’ll almost certainly get a speeding fine
I am Australian, Ive been doing track days, drift days and have done a few amateur rallys too over the last 20 years and Ive never been more scared driving than a rental car in Austria in winter on holiday. Ice and snow is a whole different skillset.
also true, but as other have said, mississippi doesn’t really get snow so given the massive difference between them and vic, i don’t think snow is really a particularly big contributor
Is this specifically relating to the difference between Victoria and Mississippi?
Between Australia and the US in general.
Mississippi gets negligible amounts of snowfall and it rarely sticks.
Oh come on. I don’t think there’s another country on the planet as car-dependent as the US. We have more cars, we drive far, far more than these countries, so of course there will be more deaths. Try it per person/mile driven and I bet the numbers shift quite a bit and it won’t be so dramatic, but the US will still come out “ahead.” On average I’d also bet the US has far higher average travel speed as well generating a higher possibility of fatal accidents.
Edit: Here. Sort by billion km driven. US is #8.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
Still high, but in context the OP doesn’t offer.
USA is definitely the most car-brained nation, but I don’t think that miles-travelled alone stacks up when comparing states.
As an example for 2022 data from FHWA it shows that Mississippians drove 17,699 miles average, while Minnesotans drove more, at 17,887 miles. Yet Mississippi has more than triple the road fatalities.
Even if you take Mississippi as an outlier, many other states are well over double Minnesota, with similar miles-driven: South Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma.
It’s not hard to keep accidents down when only one person drives on the road at a time.
Mississippi Population: 2.9 mil
Victoria, Australia Population: 7 milYour math ain’t mathin’
Mississippi is always the worst of any statistic
America is more in the middle of the road when you look at the whole globe, and don’t just select a few counties with lower death rates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
Africa is currently the reigning champ for vehicle related deaths.
Yes, but that does not make it any better, since the US should be compared to other Western developed countries. That is like people saying that the number of gun deaths in the US isn’t that bad because they are worse in Ukraine or Syria, you know, active war zones.
yes but whole africa is developing nations with ultra bad infrastructure like roads and intersections. You should be comparing USA to peering nations, like western europe or countries of the commonwealth. Unless you admit that USA is also third world shit hole
Saudi Arabia, WTF?
The Netherlands has 4.19
The Netherlands is close in size to Maryland, and close in the number of inhabitants as New York. Also half of the traffic is cars and half is bicycles. It’s pretty insane how bad Mississippi is.
I tried looking into why Mississippi was so far worse. Mostly just finding people self report texting and driving more there, infrastructure is shitty, enforcement is shitty, DUIs are high they recently just upped the civil fine of texting while driving from $25 to $100.
For fun I looked to see what Mississippi would be like if it was its own country, and do to GDP it was compared to Morocco and Kenya.
Car Deaths per 100,000
Mississippi: 26 Morocco: 17.29 Kenya: 28
Kenya is 4x as dense as Mississippi is though, so still hard to say Mississippi is safer than Kenya. It’s just numbers
tried googling it also and prompted “which state is easiest to get drivers license?” and one answer was “probably washington, you dont have to parallel park there, just attempt it” and it told me everything I need to know about the safety of US roads
the local driving schools (plural, there are a bunch) use the park nearby to teach parallel parking. I don’t think the avg driver in WA parks any worse than texas, illinois, virginia, ca or ny state. YMMV there are outstanding assholes everywhere, but I do have the privilege of a large number of places lived / driven.
Yet, Washington has one of the lowest rates on this scale. Maybe it’s because you have to go to driving school if you want a license before 18?
That’s a good amount of states, at least 10 I’m sure. Parallel parking in the U.S. is rare. I remember my mother telling me in her late 50s she had never done it since her driving test back in 77. I used to do it when I’d go into cities but it is rare to find anywhere that requires it. Some vehicles are also so big here that if someone parallel parks a truck 5cm off the curb cars will have to drive into oncoming traffic to go around them. Thankfully places are starting to crack down on that.
didnt even think about too wide cars using parallel parking in cities. I mean we have the occassional F150 in Munic downtown blocking all trams and traffic because they can’t fit europoor parking lots, but it’s always a spectacle and the owners are more often than not scolded for driving these into crowded spaces where they clearly dont fit. But if this occurance was daily, I bet our cities would only build parking houses too instead of parallels
Most places I have lived in the U.S. have plazas, giant parking lots, with stores that loop around 2 sides into a corner for the most part. They aren’t designed to be walked to. Bicycling to them is often tough as well. The mom and pops shops are mostly dead, so groceries, appliances, movies, whatever it is you are looking for are in Walmart, Target, Bestbuy, and other failing stores like Macy’s, Dillard’s, JCPenney, etc. all resteraunts are either surrounded by a parking lot, or in a plaza. Fast food is everywhere, and neighborhoods are miles from stores. The jurisdictions don’t allow commercial propertys near many neighborhoods. Slowly we are seeing more mix, but it’s a last 10 year change that I have noticed.
I think it’s fair to compare like with like. Many African countries have poor infrastructure, inadequate enforcement of traffic laws, rapid urbanization, unsafe vehicles, and limited emergency medical services. Its easy for a Western country to look better compared to that, but is it a fair comparison?
Well, if you’re comparing the US south, it might be fitting.
That’s not fair. Blue state tax pays have paid for some really nice infrastructure down there.
I understand this is largely due to Americans wanting to get drunk like everyone else but also having to drive everywhere.
And gigantic motor vehicles.
There are so many dumb regulations and circumstances that functionally push people to giant vehicles.
For instance: I replaced my 2016 VW golf base model with an electric F150 this year for a multitude of reasons. I got a refund from insurance (with the same coverage). None of this makes sense except that I’m less likely to be injured by other motorists in my 3.5ton truck. I found this depressing.
And terrible roads and/or regulations? I can’t help but notice the worst offenders are conservative areas and those usually are neglectful.
And lack of pedestrian infrastructure, and…, and… We can go on and on at how baked into the cake these deaths are in the car cult.
The transportation departments of red states just funnel the monies to corrupt buddies and nothing gets fixed even though there is perpetual road work being (performatively) done.
Ok, noted: New York is almost on par with civilized regions.
That might be skewed as most of their population are in New York City, and more than half of the city doesn’t even own a car.
That’s pretty much the point of the chart. Better public infrastructure decrease the deaths from cars.
Or commuting accidents in traffic are rarely fatal.
Thought it would be interesting to compare with EU, they published an article in 2023 (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?oldid=630784) with the following data. This graph uses a number per 1 million inhabitants so divide by 10 to compare it.
How is norway so low?? We have mostly trash roads with a few noteable exceptions. Cliff on one side, river or fjord on the other. No shoulder worth mentioning unlike sweeden, that often have half a lane on either side of the road.
driving requirements for license are vastly different among european countries, but also state of the cars, more wealthy nations replace older cars more quickly, so countries like Bulgaria and Romania often sit on their cars for sometimes generations. Add to that the constant honking and cutting off people, temperament of the populus
As far as I know Finland has the world’s strictest driving licence, so I’m actually surprised to see it posting worse statistics than Sweden here.
Sweden went insane with road security in the nineties (nollvisionen?) so maybe that’s why.
Sweden is as expected. 200-something fatalities for 10 million people. Norway stands out😃
It got me thinking about definitions, though. For Sweden every death during transportation is counted (including busses, heavy trucks and single accidents with a bike), while the definition my 2 minute googling found for Canada said deaths resulting from accidents involving automobiles.
The stats are normalised for per 1 million inhabitants are they not?
But your second point is definitely very good. I imagine getting consistent fully comparable numbers from all the various countries isn’t easy.
Need to factor in terrain and weather conditions too.
SOUTH CAROLINA #2!!! 🥳🥳🎉🎊🎉🎉🎊🍻🥳🎉🎉🪅
The fact that California, a state with THIRTEEN TIMES MORE PEOPLE than Mississippi, has less than half the number of traffic fatalities is mind blowing. Mississippi is just 30% of the landmass that California represents, and yet it gets more than double the amount of traffic fatalities.
Looking at the left side of the graph, the trend is easily recognizable. Drunk angry and repressed, poverty stricken republicans will drive drunk like it’s the right to bear arms. The further right you go, the more democratic the state.
just to be clear, this is per capita. not actual totals.
But they have more people per capita! Because they’re so much bigger, see?
Population density might play a role.
Its hard to have a fatality in gridlock.
New Jersey is too low. Serious doubts about the validity of this table.
It’s comparing against total population, not driving population, so any amount of mass transit will greatly reduce this number
Probably not. The state has been implementing Vision Zero as a statewide program along with several cities.
The two major highways have lower than average accidents due to design.
One of the state’s signature traffic configurations, the Jersey Jughandle, eliminates left turn movements on older highways, a major source of accidents.
Took a closer look to see if I was surprised by any correlation about poverty, and browsed away with the belief that the south is still a shithole… which might still correlate with poverty. I think kansas/oregon is the first entry that wouldn’t be ‘south.’
Drinkin’ beers an’ drivin’ yer trukk is a highly traditional pastime in the US deep south. Typically done in the middle of the night, in my experience, for the maximum probability of contacting the local wildlife or making friends at high speed with a tree.
Where are Idaho, Wyoming and Montana?
There are only 36 states represented here by my count. It says “major” states, whatever that means. But 14 in total are missing either because of their smaller populations, or because their fatality rate is low enough that they would fall off the right hand side of the chart and thus wouldn’t fit the “America Drivers Bad” narrative quietly being implied, here.
Edit: I looked up the numbers for my state in the same year (and no, I’m not telling the public which one). We would be at 1.2 on this chart if my math is correct, which is well below even the shortest bar for Victoria, there.
I decided to look and found that this metric is almost always measured by vehicle distance travelled rather than by population. Basically the graph OP shared is useless and meant to support a narrative, as you stated.
Does that mean that Canadians in Alberta, Quebec, and Ontario simply don’t drive long distances inside their provinces? That doesn’t track with what I’ve seen when visiting all three provinces.
Calgary relatives: “oh I’m just going to zip up to Edmonton for the day” or go for a coffee 40km to the other side of town or just do the daily 130km commute etc.
For AB I’m thinking its more “I can’t afford to live in Banff, but that’s where work is so a place in Canmore is where I call home with a 30 min commute each way.”
Or “Yeah I like living in Red Deer, but it means a 1.5 hour drive one way if I want to see the Flames beat the skates off the Leafs when they’re in town.”
Yep, all of that too: Okotoks and Airdrie are basically suburbs now.
I think it’s kinda interesting still, in that it shows people are (must?) drive so much. But yes, agree that per cap seems like the wrong statistic for any kind of safety.
Maybe more fair would be transit fatalities per mile traveled (any method)?
Yes. The preferred method is per distance travelled.
While I’d prefer to see every state and province represented, I imagine only metro areas matter here anyway. The dangers of the road are quite different when your largest city has a sliver of density compared to the rest, though by that token, density is probably a factor that even large states should account for (which would probably put NYC very low on the list lol)
