Americans are the Worst Drivers in the World

Because they drive like assholes.

Bernie Bleske
8 min readJul 24, 2023

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Photo by Minku Kang on Unsplash

You would think Americans would be the best drivers in the world. After all, no other nation on the planet spends as much time, money, and attention on and in automobiles. Over 90% of American households have at least one car; over 40% have 2 or more. There’s nearly one car for every adult in the country, and 28% of households have more cars than drivers.

We drive, on average, at least an hour a day, up to 30 miles. As a nation, collectively, we spend billions of hours driving trillions of miles every year. We cough up close to $5,000 annually on our cars, and will own at least 8 of them over a lifetime. Factor in other costs — insurance, gas, maintenance — and we drop close to $900 a month on transportation, nearly one fifth of our average monthly household expenses, second only to housing.

America has the widest roads in the world, and the most lanes. Only in America can you regularly find an eight or ten lane superhighway. There’s a few in China and other parts of the world, and just like in the States you can find yourself stuck with a million other drivers going nowhere slowly, but overall ours flow freely. Our cities each spend millions on roads every year, our states and federal government billions more. The most significant issues facing every city in…

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