Seems odd that some of the posts on BITOG have gotten a bit mean and argumentative lately...like the cat fights over Dex Cool or this one over highway safety.
Germany, France, and Switzerland used to have slightly better highway safety rates than the USA. This was interesting since highway speeds were higher in Europe, and the road systems were better in America.
The Autobahn has a more level surface, due to design, construction, and maintenance.
The Autobahn also has many sections that are narrow two lanes without breakdown lanes, or median...just two lanes with guardrails. The Merrit Parkway in Connecticut is like the Autobahn, an older less forgiving design. In other words, when there are accidents, especially in fog and rain, there are no safe places to go to avoid an accident.
But the Autobahn has a flat surface, unlike the American highways where there are uneven surfaces that can throw the cars around even at 65 mph. I-70 Westbound coming down from the Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado has a section that is so bad that it is barely safe at 65 mph on a dry road.
I drive in Germany at 130 mph to 155 mph when conditions, traffic, and speed limits allow. [ I'd drive faster , if I could afford faster cars ]
Sadly, the famous Autobahn of old is disappearing due to heavy traffic many slower vehicles, and increased truck and van traffic.
The modern Autobahn has very high traffic, with a huge speed differential, on older highway designs, with frequent bad weather [ overcast, rainy, foggy ]
But other factors like driver traing and licensing standards and vehicle mintenance requirements are also important.
Look at the 2003 fatality rate on highways for the countries below, and you'll see that the US highways are not the safest.
KILLED per 1 BILLION Veh·Km year 2003
Maximum Motorway Speed Limit in 2003 in (mph)
Austria 5.9 (80)
Czech Republic 9.9 (80)
Denmark 3.0 (80)
Finland 1.4 (75)
France 4.0 (80)
Germany 3.8 (80) (advisory)
Ireland 7.4 (75)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_safety
==================
Canada 8.9
The United States 9.4
Germany 9.7
=============================
There are theories about traffic safety like Smeeds Law:
"Smeed's Law, after RJ Smeed who first proposed the relationship in 1949, is an empirical rule relating traffic fatalities to motor vehicle registrations and population. Thus annually increasing traffic volume leads to a decrease in accidents per vehicle. It was posited after an analysis of figures from a number of countries over several decades.
Smeed's formula is expressed as:
or, weighted per capita
where D is annual road deaths, n is number of registered vehicles and p is population.
Smeed showed this relationship worked with 20 different countries. The relationship was revisited by John Adams in 1987 who held that it was valid for a variety of countries over time, for example in Great Britain from 1909 to 1973. In 1995 Adams further showed the relationship worked for the data of 62 countries. However, the validity of Smeed's Law has also been disputed by several other authors (for example Andreassen 1985, Broughton 1988, Oppe 1991, Ammen & Naji 2000)."
http://www.geog.ucl.ac.uk/~jadams/PDFs/smeed's law.pdf
===========================
My opinion is that the US highways in some areas are better in Europe. If they were maintained better and kept flat, then properly maintained high speed cars and properly trained drivers would probably post very good fatality/ passenger mile data.
