FT.com [no paywall]: “Bad driving is probably playing a bigger role in the fatality rate than larger cars and longer journeys. Car-centrism in the US is clearly part of its road safety problem — it’s about culture more than geography. So committed are Americans to their cars that 63 per cent of people choose to drive for trips of less than a mile, compared with 16 per cent in the UK. But even after adjusting for distance driven, US fatality rates remain double the rich-world average. The main reasons American roads are so unsafe stem from how they drive, not how much. On vehicle size, there is a wealth of evidence that larger cars are more deadly to pedestrians, but the contribution of America’s bloated fleet to its fatality rates turns out to be modest. US pedestrian deaths would be roughly 10 per cent lower if all SUVs and pick-up trucks were replaced with standard-sized cars, according to a study by Justin Tyndall, assistant professor of economics at the University of Hawaii…

Using phones at the wheel is a big problem in the US, according to data from Cambridge Mobile Telematics…”