To regulate or not to regulate?

fj12ryder wrote:
Here ya go: List of countries by traffic-related death rate

Obviously the US is not the worst by a long shot, but most European countries with strict licensing and training are way down from ours.

It appears that the more lax the licensing and training, the higher the fatality rate.

Now I've stated my views and I shall sit back and simply read the postings with no more arguing.

Actually, depends which numbers you look at.
- We generally don't use Fatalities by themselves in the industry because they are so rare the standard deviation can be huge (ie: for justifying road safety projects, we typicaly average them in with Type A injury crashes otherwise 1 fatal crash which is not statistically significant can totally throw off the recommendation).
- Probably bigger is Fatalities per capita, are a poor measure unless driving patterns are similar, roads are similar and distance driven is similar). When you switch to a per mile rate, the USA moves up into the European range with several European countries as bad or worse.
- Road conditions have a huge impact. Europeans tend to do far more driving in congested urban areas. Low speeds tend to limit fatalities.

As far as 3rd world countries with the worst rates...many of them actually have more difficult testing and training but the driving culture is just crazy and cars are often in poor repair.