sometimes there are those times when you’ve been at it for 6-8 hours straight with no break, and you keep staring at that one line in your config, trying so hard to see this mistake. is it a comma out of place? did i missplell something? no? and you’re staring at it so long that you just don’t see the glaringly obvious:
it’s that one remnant that you probably copy/pasted from a tutorial page and you’re too brain-fried to consider that it’s a part of the line you should have changed, so you’re not looking at it, but there it is. but, hey, that’s why forums like this exist: to get a fresh pair of eyes on the problem.
while i’m certain that automatic transmissions indeed do exist in Europe, i was simply referring to the fact that they’re far less common there.
but the fact that distracted driving is punished far more severely there, however, DOES have a major impact on how less common that habit is in European driver culture. also, probably, the culture of giving more of a damn about your fellow citiens than your average American does.
according to the study, small cars have been responsible for just as many fatalities - or not an amount disproportionate to their number - in the US, so it’s not really big car problem as much as you might suppose. this may have to do with that drivers of small cars can often drive more recklessly, but that’s speculation. And, sure, you can fiddle with your phone with a manual transmission, but, seemingly, most don’t. The difficulty makes it far, far, less likely.
but the biggest takeaways from he study seems to be 1) modern road/highway infrastructure in the US is built to get as many cars moving as fast as possible and give little-to-no consideration to pedestrians or their safety, and this need to change, and 2) the particularly American culture around in-car smartphone use needs to change via far harsher penalties for distracted diving and other behaviors which endanger pedestrians.
I was listening to a breakdown of this study on a New York Times podcast. It has to do with huge cultural differences between how Europeans and Americans interact with smartphones in cars, particularly because most cars in the United States are automatic and most cars in Europe are stick shifts, meaning that it’s very difficult for Europeans to screw around with her phones while they’re driving. Driving a car with a manual transmission requires both hands, meaning drivers, don’t have a free hand to fiddle with their phones.
Another part of the explanation for the difference between the United States and Europe in this regard is that suburban United States cities are designed in the auto age and designed very much around cars with a complete disregard for pedestrian safety, particularly at night. American pedestrians in these cities have to walk much farther and around much larger and more dangerous roads to get to their destinations, while having access to poor or even nonexistent transit networks. 
edit: one other data point they mentioned was the homeless, and while that population was rising in 2009, it sharply began to rise in 2016. these are people who are the most vulnerable in our society already, who often dwell near dangerous roads, highway overpasses, etc., and especially at night. Homeless people account for a significant portion of the increase in pedestrian fatalities in certain regions.