A State so pathetic the ones around it brag

That might be skewed as most of their population are in New York City, and more than half of the city doesn't even own a car.

As far as I know Finland has the world's strictest driving licence, so I'm actually surprised to see it posting worse statistics than Sweden here.

The way this chart is formatted is making me more angry than it should lol

Yes, but that does not make it any better, since the US should be compared to other Western developed countries. That is like people saying that the number of gun deaths in the US isn't that bad because they are worse in Ukraine or Syria, you know, active war zones.

I think it’s fair to compare like with like. Many African countries have poor infrastructure, inadequate enforcement of traffic laws, rapid urbanization, unsafe vehicles, and limited emergency medical services. Its easy for a Western country to look better compared to that, but is it a fair comparison?

The Netherlands has 4.19

The Netherlands is close in size to Maryland, and close in the number of inhabitants as New York. Also half of the traffic is cars and half is bicycles. It's pretty insane how bad Mississippi is.

yes but whole africa is developing nations with ultra bad infrastructure like roads and intersections. You should be comparing USA to peering nations, like western europe or countries of the commonwealth. Unless you admit that USA is also third world shit hole

I don't know much about Mississippi, but I know that in neighboring Louisiana, there are drive-through daiquiri places.

the fine print of the law says that the open container law is not applicable to containers with frozen alcoholic beverage where the lid is intact and no straw is protruding through the lid.

In most cases, daiquiris adhere to the “tape rule.” Most daiquiri shops will put a piece of tape over the straw hold on the lid. If this tape is removed or broken then the drink is considered an open container.

So a piece of tape counts as a "seal." They're not even trying.

Mississippi has drive-through combo shops: liquor store / DMV / KFC.

Saves time on your way to and home from church.

just to be clear, this is per capita. not actual totals.

Drinkin' beers an' drivin' yer trukk is a highly traditional pastime in the US deep south. Typically done in the middle of the night, in my experience, for the maximum probability of contacting the local wildlife or making friends at high speed with a tree.

It's comparing against total population, not driving population, so any amount of mass transit will greatly reduce this number

Probably not. The state has been implementing Vision Zero as a statewide program along with several cities.

The two major highways have lower than average accidents due to design.

One of the state's signature traffic configurations, the Jersey Jughandle, eliminates left turn movements on older highways, a major source of accidents.

There are only 36 states represented here by my count. It says "major" states, whatever that means. But 14 in total are missing either because of their smaller populations, or because their fatality rate is low enough that they would fall off the right hand side of the chart and thus wouldn't fit the "America Drivers Bad" narrative quietly being implied, here.

Edit: I looked up the numbers for my state in the same year (and no, I'm not telling the public which one). We would be at 1.2 on this chart if my math is correct, which is well below even the shortest bar for Victoria, there.

USA is definitely the most car-brained nation, but I don't think that miles-travelled alone stacks up when comparing states.

As an example for 2022 data from FHWA it shows that Mississippians drove 17,699 miles average, while Minnesotans drove more, at 17,887 miles. Yet Mississippi has more than triple the road fatalities.

Even if you take Mississippi as an outlier, many other states are well over double Minnesota, with similar miles-driven: South Carolina, New Mexico, Oklahoma.