this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Mildly Interesting
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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://www.who.int/data/gho/data/indicators/indicator-details/GHO/estimated-road-traffic-death-rate-(per-100-000-population)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate
Africa is currently the reigning champ for vehicle related deaths.
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
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.