The article makes a point of blaming "individualism" (apparently the author thinks we'd be safer if we could all just embrace "the collective good" and buy Priu

The article makes a point of blaming "individualism" (apparently the author thinks we'd be safer if we could all just embrace "the collective good" and buy Priuses) but many of these problems can be traced to government policy, or lack thereof. The NHTSA has encouraged carmakers to build bigger with size-based fuel economy standards. Outside of California, subsidies for EVs and PEVs have mostly been limited to the federal tax credits, which are lower than the subsidies I've seen in Western Europe. And some of those European subsidies used to be available for plain old hybrids, which was never the case in America. Pedestrian deaths are made worse by larger vehicles, and also by failures to invest in sidewalks, crosswalks, roundabouts, and other safety infrastructure. Speeding can be seen as evidence of selfishness, but if freeways and school zones were blanketed in automated speed traps then the self-interested choice would be to slow down. I'm not saying there's no culture involved here (the point about Republicans buying more big cars is interesting, but the survey is paywalled so I can't look into it more) but there's no need to go straight to culture when there's a wealth of more practical reasons for the state of the US vehicle market.