This map becomes infinitely more blessed with the lack of the UK in the EU.
Most of the Midwest had walkable cities until the Civil Rights movement made like 70% of the white folk flee to the suburbs creating the car hell we have today.
Tbf they started ripping up the streetcar lines 5-10 years before white flight really got going.
Yeah, but they never expanded it back like in many coastal cities.
Cincinnati and North Kentucky bought 30 miles of land to build light rail on in the 1970's and today has only 4 miles of streetcar.
https://www.cincinnati-oh.gov/streetcar/how-to-ride/route-and-station-stops/
They didn't need to expand it. Before 1950 basically every mid-sized city had a proper street car system that went everywhere. The attempts in the 1970s were a typical American clusterfuck where we attempt to rebuild something nice we used to have but in a way that's profitable which ruins what made it nice in the first place.
For reference, Cincinnati regularly had over 100 million riders a year pre-1950. It's hard to fathom how much "they took from you".
Tbf they had over half a million people in the 1940s, that's only 3-4 trips a week per person.
Everyone i know knows at least one person killed while trying to bicycle
I love how the color for the worst grade is black rather than red, because that's how your soul feels like after seeing this :doomjak:
Wisconsin could get into the green if they just stopped drunk driving literally all the time.
broke: the gun discharged
bespoke: the automobile collidedBut cursed that Northern Ireland went with it instead of uniting Ireland.
Some reasons for this
- European cars have to live up to strict safety standards and pass regular thorough inspections
- European drivers have to go through more driving education and pass stricter theoretical and practical driving tests to get a license than their US counterparts.
- European car culture is different from American. Drunk driving seems to be significantly more frowned upon than in the US and there is a cultural norm of keeping eyes on the road at all time
- Distances in Europe are shorter so drivers doesn't experience the same levels of fatigue.
- In contrast to poorly maintained car-centric US roads European roads are generally in good shape and most places have infrastructure in place to protect cyclists and pedestrians
This map becomes infinitely more blessed with the lack of the UK in the EU.
29 road deaths per million people, by WHO numbers
People don't die so much in bumper to bumper stop and go traffic. The cars need room to get up to murder speeds.
We are fast and rude, but generally more skilled than drivers in other states. Have you ever driven in Florida? It's legitimately terrifying.
It was fucking terrifying to me how easy the Californian driving test was compared to the UK’s test. Literally just take the car out around a few blocks and then drive in reverse in a straight line. There’s no separate license classification for stick shift vs automatic transmission, how the fuck is it sensible to let people loose on the roads who have only driven automatic all their lives in a manual transmission vehicle?!
You had to reverse? The hardest thing I had to do in VA was stop at a stop sign.
Vehicular suicide and murder/suicide. Wyoming is also second in the nation for gun suicide and first for gun murder/suicide.
Seriously, people hate living in Wyoming. There's also been a rapid, shocking year over year decrease in opioid deaths there in recent past, not because people are getting clean, but because people are shooting, hanging, or vehicle-ing themselves to death instead.
Suicides make up about half of their yearly population shrinkage.
:doomjak: it's fucking grim as shit in the western states.
It's also dangerous as hell to drive along the front range of the Rockies there. It's prone to super high winds and blizzards, so much so that they shut down the interstate at various points when vehicles can't navigate it. This is driving in Wyoming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouizU_s-muk
Whenever I drive there it's like 50/50 that I feel safe in my small car. It's easy to zone out when there's nothing to look at and the environmental conditions/volume of large trucks makes the non-mountainous areas really sketchy.
Yeah, in the YouTube recommended below the linked video there was footage from a 119 car pileup in Wisconsin, with only 1 death from a guy who got out of his car. Wild shit.
Oh, for sure. There is more hazardous geography in a lot of the west, but from what I've seen, the death rate only minimally changes between counties with difficult terrain and those without.
Surprised the western states are the leaders honestly
Shouldn't come as a big surprise, honestly. There's not a lot out there, the infrastructure hasn't been maintained since it was built during the New Deal era, and the few non-oil jobs have been steadily marching away from the rural areas and smaller cities for decades, so what little there is outside of major urban areas is just... Crippling poverty, rampant opiate addiction, and a population that's so small, spread out, and alienated that most have been living like it's lockdown for their entire lives.
Goddamn. I assumed the natural beauty, and I guess my imagined cozy little towns would counter that, but instead it's actually a typically American dystopia of yeoman culture self-sufficiency. Just the libertarian argument of living of the grid come to life and it turns out that not having community out weighs that, sounds like.
Yeah, unfortunately those cozy little towns are a figment of the imagination. Talking to friends who are from places like this, life in rural America seems to be like, "my neighbours are an oil derrick and a wind turbine. Sometimes I see a cow. I only see another person outside my family when we go to the store which is once a month because it's 60 miles out. My only connection to the outside world is satellite internet. It doesn't work when it's cloudy, it's as fast as DSL on a good day, ping is too high for online games, and I only have 50 gigs a month. A family member or friend dies every 3 months, but I haven't been to a funeral in years. Everyone I knew in high school moved, died, or is on meth."
