And that second graph I linked shows it pretty clearly - US traffic deaths are clearly not declining at the rate of everyone else which is why the line crosses over Britain and Sweden in like '93 and Japan and France in 2005. My argument hinges around why.

The linked article says exactly what rd95 and goobster want it to say - "because Americans are assholes." I have never not seen that sort of argument be overly-simplistic at best and wrong at worst. The Brits, the French, the Swedes and the Japanese are assholes, too but that's just motive. It's not method, means and opportunity.

Newsweek, of course, is happy to oversimplify the issue. If you get a little more rigorous on it you discover that there isn't even a lot of consistency of how many drivers are tested for drunk driving, which skews the accident statistics. Here's what I know:

I dated a Serbian girl who every year would make a big road trip to the coast with her family. They'd pack up the car, buy snacks, get the maps out and settle in for a mind-blowing three hour drive. In Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Steig Larssen has his hero travel from Stockholm to the "back of beyond", an island an hour north of Gavle. That makes it two hours by car.

here in the United States, you can drive about a thousand miles a day. Two hours? I have friends that commute that to work every day. and back.

IF: Driving is inherently dangerous

AND: American culture simply involves more driving

THEN: it's entirely possible that the reason our death rate is going down less fast than the rest of the world is we're closer to the asymptote. And I don't think it's fair to wave hands and say "it's because Americans are assholes."