If a car drives over a family the driver is going to have a trial for manslaughter charges. The driver is liable for their injuries and they legally have to have insurance to cover that.

This rarely happens (at least, in Canada), from what I’ve seen in recent pedestrian and cyclist fatalities.

For starters, most are hit and runs, and often go unsolved.

When someone is caught, they almost never see a manslaughter charge. To add insult to injury, they’ll usually get a traffic violation and not a criminal charge. Failure to obey a road sign (even if that caused someone to die), for example.

And any consequences for actually killing someone tends to go with the lightest jail sentence you can imagine.

We had a truck driver kill sixteen people. He was sentenced to eight years in prison, but only served 3. Less than six months for every person killed. He would have gotten more if he hit someone’s mailbox.

I’ve heard of testimonies where people who have had their partner killed by a driver are not covered financially and any money that gets paid out goes to their insurance company, and not their family.

Being a pedestrian or cyclist in north america is incredibly high risk.