Are our roads particularly unsafe?
Yes, our roads are particularly unsafe.
Seems that when I have traveled internationally I saw a lot of what I took to be much more dangerous roads in countries with much lower deaths per population or deaths per vehicle.
Isn't this a contradiction? The roads are safer by all metrics, but you "took them as more dangerous"? What does that mean except maybe you are a poor judge of what makes roads dangerous (most people are)?
What should be changed about our roads to improve safety?
Simply implement current best practices in road design and stop building to 1960s standards in 2023.
Obviously reducing speed would increase survivability, but given the size of our nation and the fact that we like to spread out, I don’t think people would like to double their commutes and travel time.
There is a lot, lot more than speed. It's possible to have roads that are both slow AND dangerous, which is often what we currently have. But assume for a moment that we can make our roads safer by reducing speeds (it's not that simple). Why not do that?
Are the tens of thousands of deaths and tens of thousands more maimings that happen on our road routinely, not to mention the millions of dollars in ruined hardware, is worth it if you get there slightly faster (if you survive that is)?
This attitude fits the behavior pattern we see daily on the road, where it's OK to violently threaten others with death or mutilation, not for money or power, but usually simply to avoid having to wait a few seconds. Just stand on my neighborhood road any given morning and watch school kids trying to get to school.
Some people say that guns turn people violent and I think it's wrong and baseless. If they said it about cars, I would believe it and you could probably prove it.
In reality most road safety improvements have nominal impact on travel times or even improve travel times, so this is a strawman anyway.
To steel man the opposition, it would be easy to believe that older and less well developed infrastructure is more common in poor areas. Since (some) minorities are heavily represented in poor areas, if it is true that older and less safe road design is the cause of increased fatalities, perhaps that is the connection they are trying to make.
The racist roads argument is usually more straightforward... during postwar misguided urban renewal frenzies, the road-building grift decided we needed to build freeways everywhere until our whole environment looked like roads (they continued this philosophy more or less in many places). When they stole the land needed to build these roads, guess where they stole ot from...the rich white areas or the poor black ones? No need to guess, and this isn't a conspiracy or a theoretical. Over a million people had their homes bulldozed to make way for roads, most of them unneeded and just make traffic worse anyway. Unlike a lot of bogus claims of racism the roads one stands as pretty legitimate. It's important to realize that a version of this happened in every country and the key difference being who got bulldozed, and also which countries realized it was a dumb idea and stopped, reversed course, or went broke, and which one(s) decided to keep doubling down.
