Again... if you don't compare the US to any other countries, this line of reasoning might seem plausible. It's not. The US outpaces comparative countries significantly, exactly because our infrastructure and culture of driving is inherently more unsafe.

Even in the safest road-user countries[1], train incidents make the news, while most car accidents don't. We know trains (and planes) are outstandingly safe by design, and we know cars are driven by idiots and lawbreakers.

Just as we intuitively expect that going to war, seeing and doing what needs to be done will have an enduring effect on people's mental health. We expect that from all higher-stress jobs.

It's the deviation from our expectations that makes it "newsworthy" or not. That doesn't mean we shouldn't do stuff about it, or that we should be happy with our expectations, but they're big fish outside the scope of the point I'm trying to lean on here.

[1]: I'm British. Not the safest, but up there and relatively high density.

The point is that any sensible society wouldn’t continue with a transportation infrastructure that costs more and is vastly more deadly.

The drip drip is deaths with no one doing anything to make it safer.

As many die at the barrel of a gun in the US, with countless more injured and intimidated.

Perhaps it's not a sensible society.

Automotive crashes are very much preventable. We in fact know how to prevent them. It is partly why the roads in the US are so dangerous.