this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2025
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Mildly Interesting

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 minutes ago

getting a drivers license in mississippi is basically show up to the DMV, suck a cock and drive home or what?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 17 minutes ago

21 Mississippi, 22 Mississippi...

Count van Count

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

It's not hard to keep accidents down when only one person drives on the road at a time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 24 minutes ago* (last edited 23 minutes ago)

Mississippi Population: 2.9 mil
Victoria, Australia Population: 7 mil

Your math ain't mathin'

[–] [email protected] 0 points 9 hours ago* (last edited 9 hours ago)

How you know this is good data

  1. No sources. Just a chart.
  2. Randomly compares some places in North American to some places in Australia.
[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

just to be clear, this is per capita. not actual totals.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 hours ago

But they have more people per capita! Because they're so much bigger, see?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

The hell is a "major state"

[–] [email protected] 6 points 10 hours ago

Whatever comes before a lieutenant state?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 12 hours ago

SOUTH CAROLINA #2!!!! 🥳🥳🎉🎊🎉🎉🎊🍻🥳🎉🎉🪅

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 15 minutes ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 minutes ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 minute ago* (last edited 43 seconds ago)

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. 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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Well, if you're comparing the US south, it might be fitting.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 hours ago

That’s not fair. Blue state tax pays have paid for some really nice infrastructure down there.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

New Jersey is too low. Serious doubts about the validity of this table.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 12 hours ago

It's comparing against total population, not driving population, so any amount of mass transit will greatly reduce this number

[–] [email protected] 6 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Where are Idaho, Wyoming and Montana?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 16 hours ago

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)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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)?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago

Yes. The preferred method is per distance travelled.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 12 hours ago (1 children)

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."

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

Yep, all of that too: Okotoks and Airdrie are basically suburbs now.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 18 hours ago

I'd like to see the % of trucks vs cars for each location.

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