I think it is a combination of both really. If you drive around europe, especially southern europe, it is a white knuckle driving situation a lot of the time. Narrow roads, windy with no embankment, unprotected cliffsides with a pile of hatchbacks on the bottom. Pulling out a smartphone is a death sentence. In the us everything is wide, straight, and embanked, leading to a false sense of confidence where you might open up that smartphone for a minute thinking it is fine. Then we get those dashcam recordings on reddit of people slowly driving off the road and realizing it about 5 seconds too late when all four wheels are already off the pavement and the car is about to flip end over end.

i'm not sure why you're being downvoted. there is a lot of research on this, the "natural experiments" have shown that road design explains a lot of the difference in injury rates between US and EU cities.

>Stroads and piss poor urban design, largely due to objections from stubborn fire departments chasing the wrong metrics a

Save some blame for the shortsighted environmentalists. They are a huge part of why everything is so stupidly spaced out. Most of the site plans that were normal until the 1970s are just outright illegal now. These people would rather see you impoverished by rent driven sky high from scarcity than let a filthy landlord develop the whole lot without "expensive to the point of nonstarter" mitigations or accept that maybe the municipality will have to upgrade a culvert here or there. I work in a skyscraper and even it has token green space that's clearly just bullshit they chucked in to make the runoff calcs work. You can't even use it for anything because it's a planter/ditch, so the whole place is still effectively concrete jungle and they have a fence around it so nobody falls.