But that isn't the case at all, maybe Europeans are immune to smartphones: https://road-safety.transport.ec.europa.eu/document/download...
Having spent time driving in both Europe and Southern California, I'd say that European drivers are more attentive to their driving and way less likely to be looking at their phone while driving, since it's policed. You can often see drivers in SoCal holding their phone for a video call.
I wonder if this metric of "traffic light change to driver action" delay is a thing we could use as a performance metric for how well cities are ensuring smartphones aren't used by drivers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-614...
https://www.cbs42.com/news/crime/ohio-woman-caught-eating-ce...
https://www.carthrottle.com/news/cyclist-berated-woman-eatin...
(I used to have a corporate laptop I put a 4G WiMax chip in, and would boot it and connect to corporate VPN, open Lotus Notes, and then start my one hour commute. Then at work my Notes would be fully sync’d which otherwise took a half hour.)
But when we cast around for other explanations, for some reason it's always interesting to zero in on an uncontrollable factor that means we aren't responsible for the situation we find ourselves in.
Btw Europe is full of the same dumb humans that live everywhere else. Granted, they have better bread, cheese, and health care.
You just made that up. Pedestrians are mostly killed by head onto solid object.
Your two most common options are pavement and windshield. Pavement is worse because cars have a fair bit of engineering that goes into preventing head onto windshield. At the end of the day it's mostly a question about getting hit above or below center of mass.
Modern (ie. larger than they were 20yr ago) crossovers and midsize SUVs are doing a lot of heavy lifting in these stats. But the people who want to talk about this problem tend to drive Rav4s and not Chevy 2500s so the latter gets complained about even though the former outsold it 2:1
Relatedly, minivans are kind of bad no matter how you cut them because it's hard to stay true to the form factor and not have pedestrians go straight into windshield in fairly low speed crashes.
The US however builds a lot of roads that lure you into thinking its safe to take your eyes out. Even countryside rural roads are dead straight for dozens of miles. We take our narrow certain death cliffside roads and replace them with highways with embanked generous turns and other features like that.
A BMW X5 is only slightly narrower than an F150, a range rover vogue only another inch off that.
All fun and games with road infrastructure built for 108s and clios.....
I would get a random breath test every 2-3 months. Pulled over, breathalyser handed to me, blow, and then on my way. Very fast and efficient.
Smartphones are an absolute no no. May e you’d touch one in the outback where you can see clearly for 20 miles in every direction that nobody else is around. Everyone sets up hands free operation through a car Bluetooth. If you can’t do it hands free you simply don’t do it. You program in your GPS maps before you release the parking brake.
In America… people are annoyed when they get a $150 fine for going 30kmh over the limit.
Also, 10% is a huge effect.
Yes, people would be annoyed at first but they also will experience a sigh of relief that they don't have to reply to a boss's or co-worker's text in the middle of a commute or running deliveries, etc.
> Most other wealthy countries haven’t seen similar increases, suggesting that possible culprits like smartphones don’t tell the whole story.
- but it is so focused on telling a long-winded story that I didn't bother checking whether they'd really tried to correct for that. (My cynical guess is "no" - since if they really cared and had ruled phones out, they'd clearly say so.)
