I did some digging in a textbook that I have on traffic and transport safety. It takes a whole bunch of statistics from the OECT/ITF yearly IRTAD Road Safety Annual Report. It's 568 pages (because it has a chapter detailing each OECD country), but the juicy bits are in the first chapter. The real data I think you're looking for is all in Table 1.3, Road Fatalities per 100k inhabitants, 100 billion vehicle-km and 10k registered vehicles: If you compare the US with deaths per billion vehicle-kilometers, you can still see the US declining less fast: FR 25.9 5.9 SL 65.1 6.7 UK 12.8 3.4 US 12.9 7.0 Sidenote: it puts seatbelt use for U.S. front seat passengers at 91% (similar to other countries) and rear seats at 70% (on the low end), see page 30.Looking at the longer-term developments since 2010, the number of road deaths has decreased in all countries with validated data except in the United States, Chile and Sweden. In the United States, fatalities increased by 6.3% between 2010 and 2015 and indications suggest that the situation has not improved in 2016.
1990 2015
I appreciate the digging, but my point is that if Russian Roulette has a 1 in 6 chance of killing you every time you play, and Americans play Russian Roulette twice as often as Britons, then twice as many Americans are going to get killed playing Russian Roulette regardless of the safety of the guns they're using. That top graph indicates that Americans play Russian Roulette a lot more than anybody else and regardless of how much they spin the cylinder or how long they pull the trigger, the fact of the matter is, Americans spend a lot longer putting themselves in harm's way... and that while vehicle use in the rest of the world is leveling off, vehicle use in the US is increasing. Check this one out:
What the above table shows is that when corrected for sheer volume of driving (the red line) or when corrected for sheer volume of vehicles (the 'per 10k vehicles' stat), the U.S. fatality declines less than other countries. It doesn't say anything about the interaction effect of having both a large volume of vehicles and miles driven. That is your argument, right? I couldn't find numbers that corrected for both. It's a shame China doesn't provide reliable numbers, since they are also experiencing a very large rise in vehicles and vehicle miles.
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."
I have to admit, part of me also wanted that simple answer. My tiny roadtrip from San Diego to LA and back felt like a long-ass drive. And in that six hours, I got cut off by an asshole in a BMW thrice. But it's not like the rest of the world are saints: the Dutch are known to drive selfishly, rarely making room when you want to merge for example. Germans are nicer but are worse at tailgaiting. What I did find worrisome was that driving in the U.S. and Canada was way easier (in terms of mental energy needed) than I expected. I did not feel like I needed to pay attention as much as I do over here, like once I'm on the right avenue I just have to follow the guy in front of me and not run a red light, even in dense urban areas. It was tempting to check my phone because driving was legitimately more boring than I was used to. My impression is that distracted driving is a much bigger issue over there than here.