The complete lack of hard data and game-able statistics made me curious, so I went to the cited journal article. > It analyzes all 231,675 pedestrian fatalitie

The complete lack of hard data and game-able statistics made me curious, so I went to the cited journal article. > It analyzes all 231,675 pedestrian fatalities recorded between 1977 and 2016 in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) database. Over 40 years, most pedestrian fatalities occurred in darkness (65%) and involved male pedestrians (70%) and male drivers (67%). They were commonly in roadway lanes (90%), away from intersections (80%), and involved vehicles traveling straight (83%). Most occurred on roadways with speed limits of 35 mph (56 km/h) or higher (70%) and four or more lanes (50%). Trends were compared across eight 5-year periods. Between the earliest and latest periods, there were significant decreases in the proportion of pedestrian fatalities among children younger than 15 (from 18% to 5%) and involving drivers who were drinking (from 15% to 8%). There were significant increases in pedestrian fatalities during darkness (from 63% to 73%), involving large vehicles (e.g., pickup trucks, vans, and SUVs) (from 22% to 44%), on roadways with speed limits 35 mph or higher (from 60% to 76%), and on roadways with four or more lanes (from 41% to 58%). [0] That comes out to around 5,792 pedestrian deaths per year. And note that the "think of the children" motif of this post is totally undermined by the cited data: whatever increase in fatalities can be blamed on SUVs and pickups, kids are apparently much less likely to get hit as pedestrians today, for whatever reason. Just for sake of comparison, in 2016, the total number of highway fatalities tracked by the NHTSA was 37,461, (of which 5,987 were pedestrians, quite close to the 40-year mean).[1] Thus, the ratio of non-pedestrian highway fatalities to pedestrian fatalities is roughly 5.25:1. "Smart Growth" endorses this recommendation: > "Cars can be designed to be safer if they strike pedestrians by using softer materials on lower bumpers and hoods and incorporating more space between the hoods and engine components, and automakers that opt not to do this will suffer lower safety ratings. Yet, hard materials that crunch and break off are used in bumpers because of the conservation of momentum, and the fact that people in other cars are clearly at a much greater risk than the average pedestrian. Other recommendations like making the front ends longer run into problems with fuel economy standards. The auto industry is not immune from criticism, but automotive engineers are stuck between a rock and a hard place. It seems utterly insane to me that they should be expected to optimize for this case when auto-auto collisions are much more common and deadly, and when the pedestrians personal choices are clearly a factor. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0361198120933636 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0361198120933636 [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fatal-traffic-crash-data https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...