How many of those 64% had their accident because of phones/drugs/recklessness and claimed to be distracted instead? With all the liability and shame involved in fatal crashes there's absolutely no way people are going to honestly self report illegal behavior.

The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.

no. As per the link, that is 64% of <<distracted driver>> fatalities were "lost in thought". not 64% of <<all>> fatalities. Distracted driving is the 2nd or 3rd largest factor in fatal accidents (behind speed and alcohol I believe). Somewhere around 20-30%. Though this is for fatalities. Distribution is going to be way different for just hospitalization or property damage accidents.

You can see it in what people say right after an accident, stuff like "He came out of nowhere".

In my callow youth I was responsible for a couple of fender benders and the cause was always a highly imperfect understanding of the appropriate stopping distance of my car. This obviously gets worse, the worse the conditions are. My Tesla never makes this kind of mistake.

I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.

You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.

It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).

I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven.

So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.

Remember, I'm responding specifically to how good people are at driving, not how likely they are to die while driving. How likely a person is to die is mediated by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how good they are as a driver, like airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones.

In thread context, you're conflating a bunch of things, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.

1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.

2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.

3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.

4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.

5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.

Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:

If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?

I said favorable circumstance, not favorable conditions. I mean the person in front of you doesn't stop quickly or veer into your lane very often regardless of whether there is e.g. fog or some confusing signage. Knowing what to do in a confusing situation is a hard problem, but avoiding a crash when someone stops abruptly with full visibility requires mostly safe management of speed, distance, and lane exit options, which people are terrible at.

It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.

The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.