Comment by TylerE
7 hours ago
Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull made up stats out of your ass.
The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
I count 14 countries higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.
Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.
It’s referring to a specific culture of people.
No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.
Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.
Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.
It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.
You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.
No, they're generally referring to the set of countries depicted in these maps [1], for the reasons described in the article [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:West...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked that well.
Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving, I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;)
The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously, we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test is genuinely difficult to pass.
I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently throughout the primary national curriculum.
And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never quite forget, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE
Is this written in jest, or is there something more serious behind it? Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an obvious reason why "road handedness" (left vs right) would matter for road safety. Could it something about more people are right-handed so there is some 2nd order safety effect that I am overlooking?
Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you note right-handed people are more common. The countries with the highest percentages of left-handed people are around 12-13%.
In countries that drive on the right then drivers use their dominant hand for any controls that are on the inward side and their other hand for the control that are on the outward side of the driver.
Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission, and anything on the center console such as the climate and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation system.
In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-handed people, with the possible exception of the exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers. Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions in left and right drive models instead of reversing them like they do the rest of the controls.
Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference? If everyone obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.
If someone for example tried to type in a destination using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system console while driving I'd expect that they would take longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant hand, so they would be distracted longer.
Yes, it was in jest.
The US is just a big place. We drive a lot. Average annual mileage is about 13k vs 7k in the UK.
The USA don’t do very well on the deaths per km metric either.
> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?