Well yeah, that’s a huge issue. What people outside of the US might not know is that it’s caused by people being unable to afford to maintain their vehicles and unable to afford living without a vehicle. People are trapped, and it puts them in the position of replacing their tires when they should or feeding their kids and trying to drive carefully enough to compensate for unsafe tires. On a population level, that obviously leads to less safe roads (as does the necessity of cars in the first place- a lot of people who aren’t great drivers would be able to choose not to drive, if they had alternatives).

Studded winter tires cost $135/piece for a twenty year old Camry at the cheapest auto parts place where I’m from, which is a little bit more expensive than in Germany (I’m very surprised, I figured Germany would be much more expensive), but owning a car in Germany is a luxury. In much of the US, people cannot reliably get to a suitable job without a car. I used to live in Connecticut, which is pretty densely populated compared to most of the country, and I had the options of retail work within walking distance (retail jobs tend not to hire or schedule employees for full time work, because then they’d have to offer benefits like access to discounted company rates for health insurance, but they generally require full availability, so it’s not easy to double up on part time jobs), or jobs in the area I did work at the time, which was 35 kilometers away and took more than two hours each way by bus.

In good weather, I would ride my bike, but only because my office had a gym with showers- otherwise I would not have been able to be presentable at work. I enjoyed doing it, but I also ended up cycling for about three hours a day, which is not sustainable for most people. Plus, I had to eat a full extra meal every day to maintain my weight after I started doing it.

I was actually even lucky compared to most people in the USA. I had a relatively short commute, a relatively good bus route (yes, really), and it was possible for me to ride a bicycle safely to work on roads with well marked, if unprotected, bike lanes. Many people have nothing available to them at all within walking distance and cannot afford to move to a more populated place.

That’s part of why I’m so grateful to be able to live in Germany- here it’s a lot more difficult to get to the point of isolation/poverty that’s relatively widespread in the USA. It’s not impossible and there are hungry people and people who fall through the cracks here, but almost half of Americans have less than $1k in savings, while needing to own a car. Of course vehicle maintenance falls to the wayside.