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And also insurance companies charging just as much as they can get away with.

The US system is designed to squeeze every last penny out of a person, to the point they can still "survive," but not so much that they become destitute and can no longer buy things and pay for essential services.

People insist on outlawing speed cameras and red light cameras, driving up accident rates and severity.

I can't speak for your state, but red light cameras started being a great source of revenue from fines, so people started rigidly adhering to them. So this caused two problems.

1. While there were less T-bone accidents meaning people running red lights and hitting perpendicular traffic, all other types of accidents increased by 18% because people were hard stopping so as not to get fined and getting rear ended. source. So if your point is lower costs because of fewer accidents, Red light cameras increased accidents.

2. Because people were not running lights anymore, the fines from red light cameras went down. The money was so good that cities got greedy, they started randomly decreasing yellow light times to cause more people to run red lights to increase fines again video source

Red light cameras cause accidents because people slam on their brakes too hard.

You forgot the big part

As an example, progressive insurance

It’s more profitable to raise rates, and they can get away with it

Some of these are valid. But speed cameras do fuck all for safety. They are a private company scam to take money from people

Those first two, the "people" are largely the auto manufacturers.

Smaller and cheaper cars are SUPER popular in the rest of the world and are literally not available at all in the US. The auto mfgs will tell you it is because of US preference, but in a country of 330 million, there doesn't need to be that much demand compared to these vehicles popularity in, say, a cheese-loving nation of 65 million. Even if they are immensely less popular, there is still MORE than enough market for some of these ALREADY-BEING-PRODUCED vehicles.

But the US auto mfgs refuse. They go bigger and more expensive. The US consumer has no real choice.

For your fourth and fifth, the "people" are US civil/transportation engineers. They must be stopped. They are a scourge. There's no culture of safe road engineering in the US. AASHTO are an association of insane fuckwits.

I am incredibly skeptical that the behaviors of US drivers are significantly different than anywhere else in the world. I'm pretty skeptical of worries over inspections or licensing requirements and am CERTAIN that additional police enforcement will only cause more mayhem and death and not protect any life. I believe it's almost entirely a problem of road engineering, urban design, and vehicle design.

People insist on driving more expensive cars, driving up replacement and repair costs.

It's not like the average US consumer has a say in this. The cheapest car you can drive off a lot is like 25k now. We could have less expensive cars but for half a century we've used tariffs to provide an unfair competitive advantage to our domestic motor companies who only took advantage of it to price gouge.

Another factor (in the US at least) is over-litigation of any and all traffic incidents. Seems like the default practice now is to get lawyers involved for a fender bender that breaks one tail light. The "at fault" drivers insurance ends up using lawyers to go back and forth haggling with the "victim" drivers lawyers and they finally settle on some ridiculous payment that is 10x what the actual damage was. All that cost gets passed on to everybody who buys car insurance.

Speed limits dont decrease acidents. They are the most famous example of a safety feature not working

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