by Richard Farr
After I moved from the UK to the US it took me only a couple of years to cede to my friends’ pleas and start driving on the right. When in Rome, and all that. But I still like to irritate Americans by maintaining that we Brits are better at this essential mechanical skill. I mean, when we drive, we drive. Or, OK, we drive while texting, shaving, putting on makeup, or having sex. However, we absolutely draw the line at driving with a gallon of Coke in one hand and a three-pound tub of fries clutched between our sweating thighs, while using a dripping Deluxe Double Bacon MegaBurger with Extra Pepper Jack as the sole point of contact with the steering wheel.
My wife still teases me about my unwillingness to eat while driving, and conceivably I’m wrong to suspect that getting a spear of dill pickle in the eye increases accident rates on American roads. But on a related safety issue my prejudices have been given support recently both by unimpeachably anecdotal evidence and, better yet, a random video I found on YouTube.
The typical American freeway has three to five lanes. (If nineteen, you’re in L.A.) Widespread laws ban trucks from the far left lane. A large majority of states have at least something on the books requiring all traffic to move over unless exiting or overtaking. Even those members of the Union in a primitive stage of legal development (Hello CA! Hello MA!) at least encourage this behavior, because everyone who’s ever thought about it agrees that “lane discipline” improves both efficiency and safety.
Yet many American drivers seem never to have thought about it. Whether burger-steering at the speed limit or at that most annoying 4 mph less, they love to camp out in the middle lane or even the left one, sometimes for days at a stretch, strenuously exercising their Constitutional right never to look in the mirror or exhibit any awareness of the traffic around them. Recently on I-5 near Seattle my car and several others were stuck for miles, at sixty-something in a seventy limit, behind three cars that were flying next to one another as if in formation, one per available lane. It was like trying to shop in a hurry at Costco on Saturday.
A video explainer by Christophe Haubursin and Joseph Stromberg, available on Youtube, confirms my darkest suspicions: this one particular national driving tradition / habit / symptom / affliction / pathology, so immediately striking to foreigners, (a) messes with the national blood pressure averages, (b) makes Eisenhower’s magnificent highway system far less efficient than it might be, and (c) kills large numbers of people.
An ugly bit of backstory. For a while it looked as if we might be seeing a long-term decline in road fatalities, but this is mostly cherry-picking. From a staggeringly appalling 53,524 road deaths in the US in 1979 (please stop right here and read that number again, slowly) there was a decline to “only” about 35,000 deaths a year by 2010-14, a 35% reduction. Popular explanations include better brakes, better tires, the demise of the disco mix tape, and larger burgers that offer better contact with the steering wheel. But my state of Washington is typical in having seen traffic deaths almost double again from 2013 to 2023; nationally, a sharp upward spike began in 2015 and now we’re almost all the way back to 1970s levels of carnage: 46,980 deaths in 2021; 46,027 in 2022.
Here’s a big slice of context to chew on, or choke on. During 1968 and 1969, the two bloodiest years of the Vietnam war, a total of 28,679 American soldiers died from combat and all other causes. Our history books and war memorials suggest that this is a fact worthy of some attention. Yet road crashes end the lives of far more Americans than that every single year, year after year after year. The US withdrew from Vietnam in 1975. In the half century since, fatalities in the Civil Road War have exceeded the entire current populations of Seattle and San Francisco combined.
That statistic is worse than it looks. A large percentage of the victims are pedestrians (typically 7,000 per year, including many children) and cyclists — not the people belching fry-grease while careening around at ten over the limit in mortgaged blocks of steel. And the US has done far worse than most at reducing deaths in recent decades.
I once had trouble renting a car in Ireland. My American credit card company, on whose insurance coverage I routinely rely, said in their small print that they excluded Ireland (uniquely among countries in western Europe) as a bad risk. A bit of research revealed that this is like being told by a Yemeni warlord that it’s risky to drive in Canberra. Ireland has safer roads than most European countries; it has much, much safer roads than the US. The annual rate of road fatalities for Ireland is around 3 per 100,000 people. Norway and Japan do better at 2 per 100,000. France, Canada and Hungary do worse at around 5 per 100,000. The US’s number is a sensationally appalling 13. Its most obvious peer country is Kazakhstan.
Where do all the United States’s “excess” road deaths come from? No doubt optimism, individual liberty, and the incorruptible dignity of the Supreme Court have something to do with it. Also a passion for ever-larger vehicles, which are much more likely to kill people; also roads designed to maximize speed even in densely populated areas; also one of the rich world’s worst systems of road markings. (News alert to American planners: paint has been invented. Reflective paint has been invented. Little reflective beads embedded in the roadway have been invented.) Primitive US headlight technology is another factor that’s had a lot of press; then there’s legalized pot, and even the ubiquity of automatic transmission — evidence suggests both that using a stick shift forces you to pay more attention to the mechanics of driving and that, by occupying your hands, it makes you less tempted to fiddle with your binkie phone.
Last but not least, and tellingly unmentioned anywhere as far as I can see — perhaps because the implication that most Americans have simply never been trained to drive properly is unacceptably embarrassing — is that in many US states the driving test is almost comically easy to pass.
Still, I want to put in a word for one particular consequence of that last factor: Clueless Lane Camper Syndrome. Being mainly a freeway problem, CLAMPS can’t be Death’s chief henchman. But it is dangerous, not merely annoying, because it makes other drivers slow down more, speed up more, and change lanes more. Research going back over fifty years indicates that driving slower than the surrounding traffic contributes as much to freeway collision rates as moderate speeding.
If you’re a European or British driver, or the author of one of those state laws, this rings true. It’s the most basic common sense—right up there with using your turn signals, looking in the mirror once or twice a month, and not steering with a cheeseburger: Slow stays right, Faster moves to the middle only until there’s space on the right, and Faster Still goes all the way to the left lane only until there’s space in the middle or on the right. The fact that so many American drivers don’t get this, or stand in relentless ideological opposition to it, is one of the first things you notice after you get off the plane.
Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that CLAMPS causes only one per cent of all those excess cases of “your husband / wife / child / will not be coming home tonight.”
Relative to the Ireland death rate, the US excess — how many lives would be saved each year by getting from 13 per 100,000 down to 3 per 100,000 — is about 35,000 souls. So in this case an instant end to lane-camping would not only cause national rejoicing when everyone discovered that New York to Boston took half an hour less — free cheeseburgers all round! — but would also be like saving all the lives in an otherwise doomed 787.
Attentive readers may say I am pulling that sort of number out of a hat. I say: I had no choice, because as far as I can tell we don’t have a clue. Let’s get brave and do the research. Let’s see if we can give CLAMPS a body count.
On no account do I wish to overshadow the many other good suggestions by US safety advocates. They favor proven life-savers like lower suburban and interurban speed limits, stronger and more fully automated enforcement of those limits (big fat tickets, it turns out, concentrate the mind wonderfully), and a scorched-earth policy towards intoxication and cell phone use. Three cheers! I only want to suggest that we improve driver education so that it covers the proper use of a burger. And what a mirror is. And how to use the stalky thing next to the steering wheel that makes the pretty yellow lights flash.
And, above all, how this knowledge makes it so much easier and safer to move over.
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