Why is driving so much more deadly in the US than in England & Wales?

This report on differences in life expectancy between the US and England/Wales show a 2.7 year gap in 2023 (78.6 in the US v. 81.3). Most of the gap can be attributed to three things: Overdose deaths, gun deaths, and car accidents. (A fourth factor is higher cardiovascular death rates, but the relative difference here — 38% — is tiny compared to the differences in the other three factors).

Americans are more than three times more likely to die from overdoses (31.6 v. 9.3 per 100K). Note that the latter figure from England/Wales is pretty much what the US rate was twenty-five years ago, so thanks Sackler family!

The gun violence (homicide/suicide/accident) rate in the US is 133 per million v. one per million in England/Wales, for the very simple reason that private handgun ownership is almost completely illegal in the latter places, which supports the counter-intuitive theory that not having a few hundred million guns floating around will lead to radically fewer gun deaths.

The contrast I found most interesting was in motor vehicle crash deaths: 13.3 v. 2.2 per 100K. Now an obvious potential explanation for this is a lot more driving in the US. The data I could find suggest that there’s about twice as much car mileage per person in the US than in England/Wales. This would make the fatality rate per mile driven three times higher in the US, rather than the six-fold difference we see in total fatalities per capita. Three times higher is still a massive difference, of course, so what would explain that? A lot more SUVs? A lot more aggressive driving? A lot more drunk driving? The driving landscape in terms of where roads go and what speeds are allowed, either formally and/or functionally? (A related topic that I’ll save for another post is the evident deterioration in driving habits in the US since the pandemic, when enforcement of traffic laws essentially disappeared for at least a year and a half IIRC).

In any event that’s a huge difference, that I thought would be worth noting and discussing.