Article starts off a bit poorly as if it is about to suggest that it's all the pandemic's fault because it made everyone crazy, but fortunately it doesn't quite

Article starts off a bit poorly as if it is about to suggest that it's all the pandemic's fault because it made everyone crazy, but fortunately it doesn't quite go that far. Of course it would be ridiculous to suggest this. Do we not think that the pandemic wasn't a terrible psychological event for folks in France and Canada too? The difference must lie with the things that we know are systemically different between the United States and Europe and Canada and other places. We know that the infrastructure is worse, we know that there are less transportation options, we know that the cars are bigger and heavier. It's these differences between the United States and other places that is the core of the problem. If the problem was that the pandemic made people a bit batty, well it's the infrastructure and cars that made things worse in the United States but not as significant of a problem in other jurisdictions. Good news is that systemic infrastructure problems are fixable. This quote about France shows that things can be fixed: A country like France is proof. In 2003, the French government began installing a network of speed cameras on its roads and ratcheted up fines. As a result, rates of speeding steadily dropped in the first decade of implementation, as did the number of severe injuries and fatalities. I feel like this quote should be appealing to the engineering oriented folks that read this site: “A good systems design has to account for people making mistakes and prevent those mistakes from being lethal,” he said. The core problems America has is that the terrible infrastructure has made it incredibly easy to make mistakes, and as cars have become bigger and heavier the cost of those mistakes is getting worse and worse. If the pandemic is at all at fault is that the stress from it was exacerbated by the terribleness of the restrictive automobile oriented infrastructure in the United States which in so many places is the only option.