re: #185 JC1

TLDR: do they quote the death rates per distance driven? That would seem like a better comparison than per capita.

No. They don’t. I agree it would be a relevant comparison.

However, there is a paragraph on how it used to be much worse in Japan and how changes have improved the numbers (better mass transit, drunk driving laws, etc.)

And Japanese roads are getting even safer: 2021 saw the fewest road fatalities of any year since record-keeping began in 1948. It’s quite a change from the 1960s, when a booming economy and millions of inexperienced drivers contributed to annual fatality figures six times higher than they are today. So dangerous were the nation’s streets that Japanese observers called the phenomenon the “Traffic War,” noting that annual roadway deaths exceeded those from the First Sino-Japanese War in 1894-5.

A closer comparison would likely be to Canada.

As I wrote recently in CityLab, an American is now about 2.5 times as likely as a Canadian to die in a crash and three times as likely as a French citizen.