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Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010. Clearly whatever policies politicians are pushing aren’t working. Might the regulatory capture of t

Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010. Clearly whatever policies politicians are pushing aren’t working. Might the regulatory capture of the car and Highway industries have anything to do about it?

s1artibartfast 5y ago
Can you share a link? I wonder if it has to do with cities implementing more mixed-use roads Alternatively, I wonder if it is attributable to increased smartphone use by pedestrians and or drivers. Personally, I find operating the UI on phone navigation and audio players very cognitively taxing.
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  And (if true), I wonder if it's due to the average size of cars, and safety features that prioritize the vehicle's occupants over that of squishy and brittle street users not inside steel cocoons.
- dc-programmer 5y ago
  Quick link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-in-the-us-by-year/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/1719... If you are interested in a deeper dive “Right of Way” by Angie Schmidt is good review of the current research. The biggest issue is the increasing market share of SUVs and trucks which are both more likely to hit and kill pedestrians. Other issues are an increase of poor residents in suburban areas that were not meant for walking, and road design that only considers car efficiency (consider the implications of setting walk sign duration to the average pace of an able bodied middle age male - wheel chair users and the elderly are heavily represented in fatalities). Mixed use roads can mean a lot of things, but narrowing streets actually reduces fatalities because it serves as a traffic easing measure (see Vision zero). My personal take is yes part of the problem is infrastructure, and academics who study systems will hone in on that, but the other problem is the complete abdication of personal responsibility in American society. Politicians are too afraid to hold middle class voters accountable for traffic violence or anything else really. The flip side of personal freedom is having to face the consequences of your actions. In some states a DUI conviction does not automatically suspend the drivers license. So I do appreciate left leaning politicians attempting to improve infrastructure, but my concern is these measures are being used to carefully avoid blaming individuals for their actions this laundering society’s terrible driving habits (which I really do think could be changed through social norming and enforcement. I am very biased though. I’ve almost been hit by multiple cars this year who failed to yield to pedestrians in the cross walk.
  - mrandish 5y ago
    +1 on personal responsibility. I'm also frustrated by squandered opportunities for improvement. One example: allowing red-light cameras to become a money grab by revenue sharing with the suppliers and thus subject to lobbying, influence and gaming like shortening yellow lights and buffer times to increase $$$. That crap has created political resistance to the concept. The frustrating part is that few people would oppose putting red light cameras on most major, high-traffic, >35mph intersections - as long as they were restricted to only sending an automatic warning to "orange light sliders" but triggered serious enforcement and even in-person follow-up for the rare (but deadly) people who fly through at high-speed long after other traffic is actually crossing the intersection. Over the past decade, I've almost been broadsided twice by people barreling through a major, multi-lane intersection at high-speed while I'm turning left on an arrow. This despite other cars in the lane next to theirs already being stopped and waiting at the light. I was saved only by being super-cautious and going slow or halting when I noticed the oncoming car not slowing at all. If there had been a truck blocking my view of their approach, I would probably have been hospitalized (or worse) in the collision. It's hard to imagine the oncoming driver doing this intentionally as both times it was clearly near-suicidal. Now that the capability to do fairly discerning automatic detection is low cost thanks to cheap imagers and processing, detecting those rare yet dangerous people (who are likely drunk, high or possibly even having brief 'waking blackouts' without knowing it) could help get them off the road before they actually kill someone. The benefit to narrowing the 'targeting' for enforcement is that instead of dozens or hundreds of revenue generating tickets per day, we'd be finding a handful of potentially deadly near-incidents. A number small enough that each could be carefully reviewed and the scary ones could get not only a ticket but a welfare check from community liaison officers.
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    Thanks for the link, For those interested, here is the source report: https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedestrian-Spotlight-FINAL-rev2.pdf https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedest... I was surprised to see a few things that ran counter to my intuition: A large number of pedestrian fatalities, 16%, occurred on freeways, which include interstates. Only about 25% of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 occurred at intersections. 76% of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 occurred after dark, and daytime fatalities have not seen the same dramatic increase. 33% of fatally injured pedestrians ages 16 and older had a BAC of 0.08 or higher and 16% of drivers had a BAC of 0.08 or higher. Total pedestrian deaths from passenger cars has gone up more than total deaths from SUVs (but SUV deaths are increasing faster as a % of baseline).
inglor_cz 5y ago
Not where I live. We are at a historical minimum of dead pedestrians. We drive the same cars. The problem might be elsewhere. Was this 50 per cent growth in fatalities uniform across the U.S.?
syshum 5y ago
No, there is clear correlation between increased Smart Phone Adoption and the increase in Pedestrian Fatalities. many people want to blame the increase in SUV or worse F150's because they have a flat front, this is moronic on a number of levels and seems to mainly trace back to climate change activism hate for all large vehicles. Reality is the focus continues to be to Drunk driving, when we should put the enforcement effort back on reckless driving the cause of which is irrelevant. if a pedestrian is hit be a driver because they were busy texting or playing candy crush they are no less dead than if they were hit by a Drunk, but under the law these 2 events will be treated very very differently
- kspacewalk2 5y ago
  It is a certainty that larger vehicles are more likely to cause pedestrian injury and fatality, all else equal. This has approximately nothing to do with "climate change activism" - for example, nothing changes in terms of pedestrian safety if the huge SUV or truck in question is hybrid or electric, except perhaps becoming even more dangerous because it's quieter. Above all else, speed* and bad road design kill pedestrians. Speeding is ubiquitous in North America, and roads/streets are absolutely terribly designed, with an almost singular focus to facilitate speeding and reduce cognitive load on drivers. * - though if we exchange 'momentum' for 'speed' we can tie it back to the size/weight issue.
  - syshum 5y ago
    I dont know about you, but I think a better use of time would be going into preventing pedestrian vehicle contact, then trying to ruin the vehicles people love.... (and make no mistake, adopting the changes people want to these vehicles will ruin them)
    - dorchadas 5y ago
      It's hard to reduce pedestrian-vehicle contact, in my opinion, when you have vehicles where the drivers are just so much more powerful than the pedestrian. Part of the reason people even buy those is to sit up higher, and be bigger than the others, and there's no way to reconcile that with pedestrian safety imo. Especially when speeding and reckless driving is so damn common in America. People feel untouchable in them, and that means there's an increase in the contact rates regardless of whether pedestrians have right-away or not.
beached_whale 5y ago
A lot of that is the move to bigger vehicals. Smaller vehicals are overall safer for everyone, minus sometimes the individual because of prisoners delema. That’s countered, or partially, with the ability to not get in an accident being higher due to lower mass though.
- giantg2 5y ago
  "That’s countered, or partially, with the ability to not get in an accident being higher due to lower mass though." I'm not sure that's really true. There are tons of variables that can affect performance. Like tire size/type, center of gravity, brakes, etc. Driver attention, knowledge, and skill are much more important. I believe 90% of driving is mental and the majority of accidents are due to poor choices, which seem from things like not understanding vehicle capability and limits, not knowing the law, or not paying attention.
  - beached_whale 5y ago
    Look at the stopping distances, it's affected by mass F = ma here. The a part is affected by the quality of the tires/breaks/suspension... but that's getting into specifics that don't really fit the generality of the fleet of vehicles getting larger and heavier and their variety in qualities will more time to avoid an accident that they may not have.
    - giantg2 5y ago
      I've never seen stopping distance noted that way. Looks more like force? If you aren't changing other characteristics, then yes increasing mass will increase stopping distance. The problem with this assumption is that things like friction coefficient usually change when you are changing mass (tire size is an obvious one). Most new vehicles stop 60-0 between 120-140 feet. There are heavier vehicles that stop shorter than lighter vehicles. I'm just saying it's not always that vehicles are heavy. The primary variable here (in applied stopping distance) is speed due to the simple fact that reaction time is the same and you are covering distance during that lag, plus velocity is an exponential effect. Here's a good resource. https://byjus.com/stopping-distance-formula/ https://byjus.com/stopping-distance-formula/
lhorie 5y ago
> Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010 It's a bit misleading to say that; you're not accounting for population growth, for one thing. According to https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/states/statespedestrians.aspx https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/states/statespedestrians.aspx, the numbers are: year killed population fatality rate (per 100,000 people) 2010 4,302 309,322,000 1.39 2019 6,205 328,240,000 1.89 So fatality rate did increase, but not by 50%. And in fact, it's down to 1.89 in 2019 from 1.95 in 2018, to give some context as to wiggle room. Also, the rate varies wildly by state (anywhere from 0.48 to 3.96)
- Aeolun 5y ago
  Ok, so it’s 35%. That’s still a fairly large number.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    To put it in perspective, 6k deaths in a year are about two orders of magnitude lower than covid deaths in 2020. Heart disease similarly claims some 600k+ lives every year; its death rates swing by more than 4 deaths/100,000 YoY.
    - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
      These are all preventable deaths, especially in a rich country like the US. We just need to look at similarly wealthy Western European countries and note how much lower their traffic fatalities are. This isn't some "necessary to do business" kind of thing or some debate between theory and practice; there are actual governments right now that avoid these deaths. Americans pay a lot in taxes to support roads, which are taxes that Americans that don't drive see very little of (especially since most of the federal funding goes to match Interstate highway projects). If the carless need to pay into a system they receive minimal benefits from only to also experience much higher risk for injury and higher risks of death, while other wealthy developed governments do not have such problems, then it seems silly to continue on the track we're on now.
- 5y ago
TacticalCoder 5y ago
> Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010. 2010 in the US was 11.4 death per 100 K population. 2019 is 11.9 / 100 K. So it went a bit up but overall the curve seems to be going down. > Might the regulatory capture of the car and Highway industries Highway deaths in, say, France aren't even 10% of the secondary roads + cities deaths. Not sure what the highway has to do with all this.

s1artibartfast 5y ago

Can you share a link? I wonder if it has to do with cities implementing more mixed-use roads Alternatively, I wonder if it is attributable to increased smartphone use by pedestrians and or drivers. Personally, I find operating the UI on phone navigation and audio players very cognitively taxing.

kspacewalk2 5y ago
And (if true), I wonder if it's due to the average size of cars, and safety features that prioritize the vehicle's occupants over that of squishy and brittle street users not inside steel cocoons.
dc-programmer 5y ago
Quick link: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/17194/pedestrian-fatalities-in-the-us-by-year/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.statista.com/chart/amp/1719... If you are interested in a deeper dive “Right of Way” by Angie Schmidt is good review of the current research. The biggest issue is the increasing market share of SUVs and trucks which are both more likely to hit and kill pedestrians. Other issues are an increase of poor residents in suburban areas that were not meant for walking, and road design that only considers car efficiency (consider the implications of setting walk sign duration to the average pace of an able bodied middle age male - wheel chair users and the elderly are heavily represented in fatalities). Mixed use roads can mean a lot of things, but narrowing streets actually reduces fatalities because it serves as a traffic easing measure (see Vision zero). My personal take is yes part of the problem is infrastructure, and academics who study systems will hone in on that, but the other problem is the complete abdication of personal responsibility in American society. Politicians are too afraid to hold middle class voters accountable for traffic violence or anything else really. The flip side of personal freedom is having to face the consequences of your actions. In some states a DUI conviction does not automatically suspend the drivers license. So I do appreciate left leaning politicians attempting to improve infrastructure, but my concern is these measures are being used to carefully avoid blaming individuals for their actions this laundering society’s terrible driving habits (which I really do think could be changed through social norming and enforcement. I am very biased though. I’ve almost been hit by multiple cars this year who failed to yield to pedestrians in the cross walk.
- mrandish 5y ago
  +1 on personal responsibility. I'm also frustrated by squandered opportunities for improvement. One example: allowing red-light cameras to become a money grab by revenue sharing with the suppliers and thus subject to lobbying, influence and gaming like shortening yellow lights and buffer times to increase $$$. That crap has created political resistance to the concept. The frustrating part is that few people would oppose putting red light cameras on most major, high-traffic, >35mph intersections - as long as they were restricted to only sending an automatic warning to "orange light sliders" but triggered serious enforcement and even in-person follow-up for the rare (but deadly) people who fly through at high-speed long after other traffic is actually crossing the intersection. Over the past decade, I've almost been broadsided twice by people barreling through a major, multi-lane intersection at high-speed while I'm turning left on an arrow. This despite other cars in the lane next to theirs already being stopped and waiting at the light. I was saved only by being super-cautious and going slow or halting when I noticed the oncoming car not slowing at all. If there had been a truck blocking my view of their approach, I would probably have been hospitalized (or worse) in the collision. It's hard to imagine the oncoming driver doing this intentionally as both times it was clearly near-suicidal. Now that the capability to do fairly discerning automatic detection is low cost thanks to cheap imagers and processing, detecting those rare yet dangerous people (who are likely drunk, high or possibly even having brief 'waking blackouts' without knowing it) could help get them off the road before they actually kill someone. The benefit to narrowing the 'targeting' for enforcement is that instead of dozens or hundreds of revenue generating tickets per day, we'd be finding a handful of potentially deadly near-incidents. A number small enough that each could be carefully reviewed and the scary ones could get not only a ticket but a welfare check from community liaison officers.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  Thanks for the link, For those interested, here is the source report: https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedestrian-Spotlight-FINAL-rev2.pdf https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/GHSA-Pedest... I was surprised to see a few things that ran counter to my intuition: A large number of pedestrian fatalities, 16%, occurred on freeways, which include interstates. Only about 25% of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 occurred at intersections. 76% of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 occurred after dark, and daytime fatalities have not seen the same dramatic increase. 33% of fatally injured pedestrians ages 16 and older had a BAC of 0.08 or higher and 16% of drivers had a BAC of 0.08 or higher. Total pedestrian deaths from passenger cars has gone up more than total deaths from SUVs (but SUV deaths are increasing faster as a % of baseline).

inglor_cz 5y ago

Not where I live. We are at a historical minimum of dead pedestrians. We drive the same cars. The problem might be elsewhere. Was this 50 per cent growth in fatalities uniform across the U.S.?

syshum 5y ago

No, there is clear correlation between increased Smart Phone Adoption and the increase in Pedestrian Fatalities. many people want to blame the increase in SUV or worse F150's because they have a flat front, this is moronic on a number of levels and seems to mainly trace back to climate change activism hate for all large vehicles. Reality is the focus continues to be to Drunk driving, when we should put the enforcement effort back on reckless driving the cause of which is irrelevant. if a pedestrian is hit be a driver because they were busy texting or playing candy crush they are no less dead than if they were hit by a Drunk, but under the law these 2 events will be treated very very differently

kspacewalk2 5y ago
It is a certainty that larger vehicles are more likely to cause pedestrian injury and fatality, all else equal. This has approximately nothing to do with "climate change activism" - for example, nothing changes in terms of pedestrian safety if the huge SUV or truck in question is hybrid or electric, except perhaps becoming even more dangerous because it's quieter. Above all else, speed* and bad road design kill pedestrians. Speeding is ubiquitous in North America, and roads/streets are absolutely terribly designed, with an almost singular focus to facilitate speeding and reduce cognitive load on drivers. * - though if we exchange 'momentum' for 'speed' we can tie it back to the size/weight issue.
- syshum 5y ago
  I dont know about you, but I think a better use of time would be going into preventing pedestrian vehicle contact, then trying to ruin the vehicles people love.... (and make no mistake, adopting the changes people want to these vehicles will ruin them)
  - dorchadas 5y ago
    It's hard to reduce pedestrian-vehicle contact, in my opinion, when you have vehicles where the drivers are just so much more powerful than the pedestrian. Part of the reason people even buy those is to sit up higher, and be bigger than the others, and there's no way to reconcile that with pedestrian safety imo. Especially when speeding and reckless driving is so damn common in America. People feel untouchable in them, and that means there's an increase in the contact rates regardless of whether pedestrians have right-away or not.

beached_whale 5y ago

A lot of that is the move to bigger vehicals. Smaller vehicals are overall safer for everyone, minus sometimes the individual because of prisoners delema. That’s countered, or partially, with the ability to not get in an accident being higher due to lower mass though.

giantg2 5y ago
"That’s countered, or partially, with the ability to not get in an accident being higher due to lower mass though." I'm not sure that's really true. There are tons of variables that can affect performance. Like tire size/type, center of gravity, brakes, etc. Driver attention, knowledge, and skill are much more important. I believe 90% of driving is mental and the majority of accidents are due to poor choices, which seem from things like not understanding vehicle capability and limits, not knowing the law, or not paying attention.
- beached_whale 5y ago
  Look at the stopping distances, it's affected by mass F = ma here. The a part is affected by the quality of the tires/breaks/suspension... but that's getting into specifics that don't really fit the generality of the fleet of vehicles getting larger and heavier and their variety in qualities will more time to avoid an accident that they may not have.
  - giantg2 5y ago
    I've never seen stopping distance noted that way. Looks more like force? If you aren't changing other characteristics, then yes increasing mass will increase stopping distance. The problem with this assumption is that things like friction coefficient usually change when you are changing mass (tire size is an obvious one). Most new vehicles stop 60-0 between 120-140 feet. There are heavier vehicles that stop shorter than lighter vehicles. I'm just saying it's not always that vehicles are heavy. The primary variable here (in applied stopping distance) is speed due to the simple fact that reaction time is the same and you are covering distance during that lag, plus velocity is an exponential effect. Here's a good resource. https://byjus.com/stopping-distance-formula/ https://byjus.com/stopping-distance-formula/

lhorie 5y ago

> Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010 It's a bit misleading to say that; you're not accounting for population growth, for one thing. According to https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/states/statespedestrians.aspx https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/states/statespedestrians.aspx, the numbers are: year killed population fatality rate (per 100,000 people) 2010 4,302 309,322,000 1.39 2019 6,205 328,240,000 1.89 So fatality rate did increase, but not by 50%. And in fact, it's down to 1.89 in 2019 from 1.95 in 2018, to give some context as to wiggle room. Also, the rate varies wildly by state (anywhere from 0.48 to 3.96)

Aeolun 5y ago
Ok, so it’s 35%. That’s still a fairly large number.
- lhorie 5y ago
  To put it in perspective, 6k deaths in a year are about two orders of magnitude lower than covid deaths in 2020. Heart disease similarly claims some 600k+ lives every year; its death rates swing by more than 4 deaths/100,000 YoY.
  - Karrot_Kream 5y ago
    These are all preventable deaths, especially in a rich country like the US. We just need to look at similarly wealthy Western European countries and note how much lower their traffic fatalities are. This isn't some "necessary to do business" kind of thing or some debate between theory and practice; there are actual governments right now that avoid these deaths. Americans pay a lot in taxes to support roads, which are taxes that Americans that don't drive see very little of (especially since most of the federal funding goes to match Interstate highway projects). If the carless need to pay into a system they receive minimal benefits from only to also experience much higher risk for injury and higher risks of death, while other wealthy developed governments do not have such problems, then it seems silly to continue on the track we're on now.
5y ago

TacticalCoder 5y ago

> Pedestrian fatalities have increased by over 50% since 2010. 2010 in the US was 11.4 death per 100 K population. 2019 is 11.9 / 100 K. So it went a bit up but overall the curve seems to be going down. > Might the regulatory capture of the car and Highway industries Highway deaths in, say, France aren't even 10% of the secondary roads + cities deaths. Not sure what the highway has to do with all this.