Davidc said:
I don't think we'll ever see an improvement in driving standards until as a society we take road safety seriously, and that means treating things like mobile phone use, seatbelts, speeding, illegal overtaking, jumping lights, etc. etc. the same as drink drive should be. First offence and you're banned for 3 years, another and its life.
Exactly.
The three pillars of road safety are often held to be "Education, Enforcement and Engineering".
My feeling is that in the UK, the Education element has focussed mainly on keeping people out of the way of motor traffic. In turn, that's fostered a culture in which anything that isn't motor traffic has no business on the road, and thus some degree of culpability in any collision with motor traffic.
The Enforcement element is hampered by the conception of the car as an essential, rather than a luxury, and by the ideas fostered by the way we have, as a society, approached road safety education. Aside from some exceptional cases (drink driving, for example) most other motoring law can be flouted with little concern for the consequences. The "momentary lapse of attention", even when it results in someone else's death, rarely leads to a significant, or indeed any, period of disqualification from driving. Offences that do not result in blood on the tarmac are treated leniently in general.
Lastly, Engineering, until recently, has focussed on the "right" of the driver to get from place to place as quickly as possible.