Comment by fzeroracer

I'm an American that doesn't drive. I've lived across multiple states across multiple coasts, so I can speak a bit to the issues here as someone that is primarily a pedestrian. There's a bunch of different things that add up into an absolute mess.

The first thing and the most obvious is that for 99% of people, you need a car to live. I've been able to work around that issue, but you simply cannot exist anywhere without a car. Our public transit networks are terrible, our roads are terrible and our commutes are even worse. Half-hour to an hour commutes are normalized among a lot of people. I don't see a need to hammer this point any further as I'm sure almost everyone who has tangential knowledge of the US knows.

The more insidious problem is that Americans are also incredibly afraid and incredibly self-serving, and our law system is set up to benefit that. Drivers can very easily get away with vehicular manslaughter because our system is tilted in favor of drivers. This is why we see larger and larger cars, because people want to protect themselves at the cost of everyone else. And if they do hit a kid or murder a pedestrian it was an accident and not their fault. This is also why Americans drive like absolute maniacs. Our police also rarely enforce traffic laws and drivers have only gotten worse as a result.

So we have a bunch of people that should not be allowed to drive on the road because they have to drive, where they rarely get punished for breaking the law and where the law is set up to benefit them when they do break it. This has been a universal constant across every state I've lived in, though notably Virginia was worse than both Texas and Washington in terms of drivers.