16 ms·

Report: U.S. pedestrian death rate increased during COVID

227 points by pasttense01 4y ago

throwaway5959 4y ago
Someone really needs to pull the plug on Tesla FSD.
- sundvor 4y ago
  Tesla's FSD will likely perform better than your average distracted human driver within the next few years. So, no.
  - hgomersall 4y ago
    I think it was a joke.
    - firecall 4y ago
      Or maybe a yoke?
    - throwaway5959 4y ago
      It was. Oh well.
bobthepanda 4y ago
The fix is simple. Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. The EU does, and their cars kill less pedestrians. (They do a bunch of other things too, like redesign roads with reducing pedestrian collisions as a goal, which we also do a poor job of tracking.) We will not get the results we are looking for until we start actually looking for them.
- chitowneats 4y ago
  You're right. But our cars didn't suddenly get worse during the last 3 years. The behavioral changes we're seeing in drivers since the pandemic are very, very concerning to me. We need more understanding of this phenomenon.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    This is the full press release the article is citing: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Full-Report22 https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli... It's worth noting that the trend has accelerated in the last three years but we are actually up over a much longer period of time. From 2009-2019 we erased the entire decline in pedestrian deaths from 1990: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
    - Symbiote 4y ago
      Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? That is an obvious difference with Europe. Both have much worse pedestrian safety, especially the truck. The default vehicle for someone who needs to move tools, materials etc in Europe is not a truck but a van like a Ford Transit or Mercedes Sprinter. The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. Changing either of these will take years.
      - kelnos 4y ago
        > Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? I wouldn't be surprised if increasing numbers of SUVs and pickup trucks in the US is at least partly to blame for this. If you're hit by a sedan, you're likely to get thrown onto the hood, windshield, or roof of the car. If you're hit by an SUV or truck, you're much more likely to get dragged underneath, where you can get run over by the wheels. While neither situation is particularly fun, the latter is much more likely to result in death. > The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. It would also be interesting to be able to classify what was happening when the pedestrian died in data like this. Were they crossing the street and a car going perpendicular ran into them? Were they crossing the street, and a car turning from the parallel street ran into them? Or were they walking along a road without a sidewalk, and a passing car hit them? Agreed that the US has a lot of wide, multi-lane roads, and poor sidewalk coverage on many roads, but I don't expect that situation has changed (for worse or better) all that much in the past few years, in a way that would explain the surge of fatalities. But anyway, to explain the increase in fatalities, my money would be on smartphones: more people driving distracted, and more pedestrians walking around buried in their phones, having no idea what's going on around them. Another posters somewhere here pointed out that pedestrian fatalities have been rising steadily since their all-time low back in 2009, which roughly coincides with the rise of smartphone adoption.
- nradov 4y ago
  The IIHS is looking for results. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-sedan/2023#front-crash-prevention-vehicle-to-pedestrian-day https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-se...
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    That is a test of collision avoidance. It does not test what actually happens in the event that a collision cannot be avoided, and the car hits the person anyways. It's also worth noting, the test only goes up to 37MPH, which is lower than common speed limits on arterial roads in suburban areas across the US. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-prevention-tests-2013-present https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-pre...
- Retric 4y ago
  That could help, but the article is ignores the obvious. US population growth rate 2019-2022 was quite low due to the pandemic the actual increase was 18% or ~500 people from 2019. Further, working from home changed the dynamics around driving presumably a great number of people got worse because they didn’t do it as much. The numbers of pedestrians may have also increased faster than population growth rate.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    500 additional people is a lot of people, considering that as recently as 2009 the annual death total was 4109 people. https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 4y ago
      That’s for the full year this is comparing six months worth of data, and 2009 was well outside the norms. I don’t mean to downplay deaths but looking at a few datapoints may not represent a trend. Economics, weather, etc vary from year to year.
      - bobthepanda 4y ago
        That chart shows a decline trend from 1990-2009, and then an increase every single year after that. It’s been 13 years, at which point do we call it a trend? Especially if you compare to peer nations which have not seen the upward trend: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...
        4y ago
- bearmode 4y ago
  Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses, and generally just having smaller cars helps a huge amount. A truck hits you, you're taking the impact to your chest or upper back. A small hatchback hits you, and it's hitting your legs.
  - dncornholio 4y ago
    You know what helps a huge amount? Preventing trucks even hitting pedestrians. This is the EU strength. The core safety of EU traffic is the infra, not the cars. Lighter cars and better testing is just icing on the cake.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    > Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses Some states in the US stopped requiring new drivers to take a road test before being handed a license due to the pandemic. I imagine that meant a lot more people were driving who shouldn't be on the road.
- fgededigo 4y ago
  No, it's not simple. Changing most of a country car fleet, drastically reducing traffic, changing the infrastructure, changing the population mindset, overcome the cultural wars (this is the most important thing to change). From outside, it seems that this is part of the (new) US mythology. This is really difficult to change.
  - eru 4y ago
    You don't need to do this overnight. You can change the rules for newly built (or refurbished) infrastructure only. Roads don't last forever, so if you change the rules now you'll have the pedestrian friendly infrastructure you want in 20 years, without need a big push. That's how the Dutch got (and are still getting) their infrastructure to be more human friendly.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      Right - we're still building dangerous infrastructure today. Starting to do better now is better than the status quo. It's like that quote: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dncornholio 4y ago
  Ha, if it only was this simple. The fact that EU has less traffic deaths is not because of testing, but because of the design of all the infrastructure and more importantly; culture. Yelling at pedestrians because they are walking a zebra crossing is something I cannot comprehend. Fix the infra! Get actual good designed roads that have dedicated lanes for pedestrians and cyclers. Ban cars in city centers.
  - thanatos519 4y ago
    Absolutely this! Every time I visit North America, the car-centric everything strengthens my resolve to never move back there. In Canada, I once had a visitor from Denmark who was aghast at the amount of horn honking on the roads. In Denmark the horn is to be used only in an emergency, such as the imminent threat of collision. Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn (not sure about this, it was 30 years ago). Here in The Netherlands, as a pedestrian or as a cyclist, I am regularly politely annoyed with drivers who stop for me even though they have right-of-way! This has something to do with infrastructure design, but also with the fact that most everybody is a cyclist, and of course that in any accident involving a motor vehicle and a bicycle, the motorist is by law _at least_ 50% liable.
    - consp 4y ago
      > Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn Many countries have them either as part of the sound rules or separate rules (Since you live in NL, it's a separate offence a 95 euro). It used to be part of the rule standardization process but I'm not sure it still is. Somebody can correct me on that. The reason the cars stop is good since it provides more time for both drivers to get a grip of the situation and at worse limits the speed of an impact. Though due to cyclist speed increasing due to more electric bikes there is a discrepancy on older (as in more than 5 year old) cycling crossings, not all are designed for 20+kph speeds and it's hard for drivers to notice oncoming fast traffic which is in a bend (looking at you local roundabout with a hexagonal cycling path making it impossible to see cyclists further away than the section you can see due to sharp angles and larger distances created by the hexagon).
- bob1029 4y ago
  > Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. We should also look at the overall design of these damn things. Weight. Gigantic A-pillars (do we really need this many damn airbags?). Touch screens and horrible user interface design. Drive by wire removing all sense of physicality and risk (because you sure as hell don't want those new pickup truck drivers perceiving the true weight of their vehicles...). If it meant that my A-pillars could be 50% narrower, I would happily forego the protection afforded to me by those side impact airbags. In fact, if you could promise to reduce my vehicle's weight by 1000 lbs, I would forego all forms of driver-oriented protection. The tradeoffs we've made for the driver in the driver vs pedestrian game are extremely unfair in my estimation. I hate driving these "modern" vehicles.
  - consp 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over and not airbags. My previous smaller car had the same airbags my new one (new ones a longer but just as narrow) has and had about half the width of the pillars, the new one is also twice as heavy (still light by US standards).
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - bob1029 4y ago
      > I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over Sounds like we are back to weight being the root evil here. Why do the cars need to weigh so much again? Are we dealing with circular reasoning at this point?
      - Retric 4y ago
        Batteries are really heavy as are high power ICE engines and drivetrain etc. The minimum weight for tires, suspension, exterior panels, frame, interior panels, seats etc isn’t that bad. But it gets worse the larger interior you want from simple scaling.
- presentation 4y ago
  Our cars kill people because our infrastructure is not made for human beings. The goal is not to make the cars soft and bouncy, it's to make them unnecessary.
calderknight 4y ago
The article would be more interesting if it mentioned any theories of what is behind this increase P.S. What I wonder what "equitable enforcement" means
- ops 4y ago
  It means they aren't enforcing anything.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- qiqitori 4y ago
  They link to an article that does do that a bit: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/01/09/road-deaths-surged-alongside-covid-but-who-died-exactly/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/01/09/road-deaths-surged-al...
- Symbiote 4y ago
  I think it means enforcing the law to avoid causing or exacerbating inequality. Rather than ticketing 10 cyclists rolling through a stop sign on an empty intersection, or a pedestrian crossing safely but against a red light, prioritise enforcement against those causing the most danger. Vehicles speeding in residential areas, parking in a school zone where it's forbidden, etc.
timcavel 4y ago
[dead]
chmod600 4y ago
https://xkcd.com/2733/ https://xkcd.com/2733/ What a weird way to phrase a headline. From the article, it seems US population grew 2% and pedestrian deaths by 18%. But why relate those two numbers? If the US population declined by 1%, that would not really affect the story at all, but the headline would turn into nonsense. The population is stable, so it's not really important. But even if it is, you could just turn the pedestrian deaths into a per-100k number like a homicide rate.
- corbulo 4y ago
  I'm beginning to envy those who are well versed in xkcd
- ytch 4y ago
  I also didn't get the title (or my grammar is bad?) "Increased 9x Faster" means 9*Population, or (rate_now/rate_prev)=9*Population? but Population itself is not even a rate.
nicbou 4y ago
The US is downright hostile to pedestrians. Could it be that there were simply a lot more of then during the pandemic?
woile 4y ago
The fix is simple. Humans are not designed to drive at such speeds, we've been trying to correct this for decades, and still same problem, plus, we end up with horrible and empty cities. Time to switch to safer vehicles.
- firecall 4y ago
  In our house we love watching Dashcam Owners Australia compilation videos on YouTube. It's a very popular genre. It amuses me that future humans are going to watch these videos in amazement at how medieval and barbaric driving of cars was! Driving cars like we do is totally bonkers. Barreling down the freeways at ~100kmh with only friction brakes, our reactions and the fear of mutually assured destruction to stop of us crashing into each other. It's absolute madness. We have expended tremendous resources in making cars safer whilst never admitting that we cannot fix the real problem. Which is that humans are terrible at driving safely. We have dreadful reactions and a mass delusion that we are in full-control of the vehicle at speed!
  - bbbobbb 4y ago
    This is something I think about whenever I am in a taxi/uber (don't drive, live in a city with good public transport). It's astounding that we're completely apathetic to driving at high speeds in opposite directions with clearance of meters at best. You simply put your life in the hands of hundreds of random people you pass every trip, hoping that they (intentionally or due to any tiredness, distraction or medical emergency) don't swerve in the slightest to your side and kill both of you instantly.
heavyset_go 4y ago
It'd be interesting is to see this data plotted on a map, even though, from a high level, it would probably be yet another population density map. There might be correlations with locale, demographics, environment, zoning/development, traffic engineering, etc.
- danuker 4y ago
  To avoid population density plots, you divide by population in each area/pixel you consider. This subreddit pokes fun at the phenomenon: https://old.reddit.com/r/PeopleLiveInCities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PeopleLiveInCities/
sundvor 4y ago
If Americans are anything like Australians, this should surprise absolutely no-one. People are driven to distraction here, often glued to their smartphones with zero situational awareness. When this applies to both drivers and pedestrians, the outcome is predictable.
- daniel_reetz 4y ago
  Here in Los Angeles, I noticed a dramatic uptick in phone usage while driving over this time period. I believe the primary cause of driver and pedestrian distraction is phone usage.
- girvo 4y ago
  Which is why I don't blame QLD for adding their "mobile phone while driving" cameras. It's silly to me that people do. Of course that can't solve for pedestrians looking at their phones, but drivers at least should be stopped from doing so.
asgraham 4y ago
I'm absolutely behind both the message and call to action of this article; the evidence is irrefutable; this comment should not be interpreted as calling into question the headline at all: the underlying data looks solid. However. Why oh why did this author trash their own credibility by explicitly citing the "even more alarming [surge] at the state level" where "walker deaths had increased a shocking 266.67 percent in Nebraska, 150 percent in New Hampshire, and 87.5 percent in Delaware." They of course give the bare minimum caveat that "[t]hose dramatic numbers are partly explained by those states' small populations," but they are entirely explained by those states' small pedestrian fatality rates. Such as New Hampshire's increase from 2 to 5 fatalities. The other two "alarming" surges are equally unmentionable[1] in the light of actually reading the numbers. I do have to give them credit for including the relevant numbers directly in an image in the article so that I didn't have to do any digging to figure out why those states had such high increases. But that just makes me even more baffled why they didn't catch themselves. [1] Literally unmentionable, as in: those particular percentages cannot in good conscience be mentioned anywhere near a self-respecting argument for transportation reform.
- chaps 4y ago
  Streetsblog has a tendency to use infrequent/irrelevant traffic deaths and such to paint pictures about wider things. Things like, using hit and runs at stop signs to argue about speed limits. They did that a lot in Chicago when the city was pushing to raise the speed camera sensitivity from 10mph to 5mph. It makes it really difficult to take their writing (about genuine problems) seriously.
  - drewbug01 4y ago
    > infrequent/irrelevant traffic deaths I’m all onboard the accuracy train with you, but I must say that describing any kind of traffic death as “irrelevant” seems very cold. Every person that dies on the road matters.
    - chaps 4y ago
      Of course, but when you stretch the truth, you lose the message and lose the people you need to reach the most. To me, that sort of truth stretching is way colder than I could ever be.
concordDance 4y ago
Comparing population growth rate and pedestrian death rate is a bizarre comparison. If the population growth rate was 0.5% then a 4.5% increase in pedestrian deaths isn't particularly impressive and could have many causes, such as much more people walking around due to wfh. Feels like agenda driven statistics.
ksimukka 4y ago
Recently (3 months ago), I was visiting family in Portland, OR and experienced an odd event. For context, I currently live in Oslo, Norway. As I was using a crosswalk, a Prius driver felt compelled to yell slurs at me. I can only guess that the inconvenience of having to yield to a pedestrian was some kind of trigger. Another observation was that very few pedestrians wear reflective gear. It almost seemed as if wearing dark clothes at night was intentional. I suspect that also has a negative effect on drivers as it can be extremely difficult to see pedestrians. I think pedestrian and driver safety go “hand in hand”. In Norway, pedestrians are expected to wear reflective gear and drivers are required to yield. Based on my empirical evidence, it is significantly safer walking in Oslo, Norway than in Portland, OR. I can only hope at this point that enough people come together to try and improve the safety in the states.
- _Wintermute 4y ago
  > the inconvenience of having to yield to a pedestrian was some kind of trigger I've experienced this in the UK as well using a zebra crossing. A driver decided to accelerate at me and then slam on the brakes as late as possible, then lean out the window to swear and tell me to get out the way. It definitely seems like extremely aggressive driving has become more common over the last few years. Not sure if it's just driving or the general attitude of people due to covid, inflation etc causing people to have shorter fuses.
  - robflynn 4y ago
    The same thing happened to me recently! I had the walk indicator lit, crossing in a cross walk, someone comes speeding up to me and stopped and yelled at me to "get my ass out of the road." Someone else drove up on the sidewalk and almost hit me -- they were on their phone when it happened. People are nuts.
  - tarsinge 4y ago
    My pet theory is lot of people overextended themselves due to easy financing[0] and are perpetually frustrated when driving due to the insatisfaction of getting very little of what they imagined. They are just commuting like everyone else but with an additional big bad financial decision. Pedestrians, bicycles, other drivers, everything then become an instant scapegoat for their frustration. [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-14/new-car-prices-are-so-high-only-rich-americans-can-afford-them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-14/new-car-p...
Beaver117 4y ago
Does anyone have data on car accidents the past couple years? Anecdotally everyone I talk to notices driving is much more dangerous now.
WeylandYutani 4y ago
Pedestrian as in "drove to Walmart and died on the parking lot crawling to the motorscooter from a heart attack"?
temp_acct_0xabc 4y ago
[flagged]
fsckboy 4y ago
the period of time in question here is "Covid times", which was a time of office and school closures and remote (home) school and work. Could these statistics be more influenced by pedestrians than by drivers?
xvilka 4y ago
Building public transportation is part of the answer. US should stop its unhealthy obsession with cars and build necessary infrastructure like most of the world does.
- localplume 4y ago
  [dead]
leonroy 4y ago
I was curious to see if the UK had a similar rise, nope a 14% fall in the same period of pedestrian deaths (slight rise in deaths of cyclists and car occupants though): https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-year-ending-june-2022/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-year-ending-june-2022 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... As an aside the article title is sensationalist to say the least - according to the article the US saw a 18% rise in pedestrian deaths in the same period.
contravariant 4y ago
Now hang on a minute. The title is incredibly misleading. The reason to compare pedestrian deaths to population is because more pedestrians with an equal death rate leads to more pedestrian deaths. So far the comparison is clear. What you cannot do however is to compare the relative difference in relative growth rates. That's one level of 'relative' comparison too far. Heck the population could very well have been constant over 3 years (it is decreasing in some countries) so if you're dividing some positive number by the relative population growth then you're going to end up with a bigger number, but that fact is meaningless. The phrasing suggests that the chance of getting injured has increased 9 times, but it hasn't, it's increased about 16% (the 1.18 times more deaths divided by 1.02 more people). Other than evaluating the relative risk there is no sensible reason to compare it to population, so any other calculation simply does not make sense. Unless you're willing to say it had decreased 18 times faster had the population shrunk by 1%.
- didntreadarticl 4y ago
  Now hang on a minute Really well earned use of 'hang on' there, sounds like the article is bollocks
  - contravariant 4y ago
    Presumably the numbers are correct, but the title is statistical bullshit.
    - quickthrower2 4y ago
      Technically correct but designed to mislead. Statistical assholery.
      - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
        This sort of "lying but with some plausible deniability on top" is SOP in the world of "journalism bordering on activism", a category which the site clearly falls into whether one agrees with the policy they're peddling or not.
Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago
[flagged]
- aww_dang 4y ago
  Satire?
- adrianN 4y ago
  Interesting proposition. To my knowledge, cities tend to have democratic majorities. Cities is also where most accidents with pedestrians happen, because few pedestrians are around outside of cities.
MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
Steve Sailor makes the case that the unprecedented rises in traffic fatalities are connected to the Black Lives Matter protests and the ensuing reduction in law enforcement: https://www.unz.com/isteve/traffic-accident-deaths-up-7-year-to-date-in-q1-2022/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/traffic-accident-deaths-up-7-year...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
BigCryo 4y ago
[flagged]
darthrupert 4y ago
Just as a reminder that it doesn't have to go like this: Finland sees record low number of road traffic fatalities in 2022. https://yle.fi/a/74-20010847 https://yle.fi/a/74-20010847
phendrenad2 4y ago
Whatever the cause is, it's likely too abstract for us to attack easily. The simpler solution is probably to build more underground tunnels and over-road pedestrian bridges, and waiting for self-driving cars to become widespread.
wunderland 4y ago
A friend I knew as a child was killed last year on her bike as she commuted to work. She lived in a western US city and after her death I learned that this city has the same number of total bike deaths per year as New York City! We can argue about the statistics used by this article and the math here but it doesn’t really matter. The fact is US cities are not built for anything besides cars (with the exception of NY and maybe a few tiny downtown areas where hardly anyone lives). Urban planning on the US is a disaster and the decisions made 50 years ago amount to large, sprawling suburban areas we pretend are cities.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  > The fact is US cities are not built for anything besides cars (with the exception of NY and maybe a few tiny downtown areas where hardly anyone lives). They were though, and it's a big shame that changed. I seem to recall Los Angeles had the largest streetcar system in the country.
  - vel0city 4y ago
    Most cities in the US were practically small towns in comparison to the populations of today. The vast majority of most of our cities were built post 1930, with a few exceptions like NYC. In 1920 the population of LA County was about 900k. In 1950 it was 4 million. In 2020 its now 10 million. For comparison, the population of Amsterdam went from 650k in 1920 to 835k in 1950 to 872k in 2020.
    - pgodzin 4y ago
      Part of the problem is that increase in population happened in outward sprawl. There isn't anything particularly incompatible with a modernized version of that transit system at that density.
      - vel0city 4y ago
        The sprawl makes up massive chunks, if not the majority, of US cities these days, and has been so in most of what is now our cities since those areas existed. So suggesting our cities were designed for dense urban cores and it was the automobile that somehow destroyed it is revisionist IMO. Our cities experienced the vast majority of their growth when automobiles and fuel were relatively cheap, when most people weren't aware of greenhouse gasses or didn't necessarily care about the environmental impacts. So we built our cities reflecting what a lot of the population wanted at the time: automobile access. Its not like LA was a city of 10 million people in a dense urban downtown with cable cars, then GM came in and spread them all out. The city with cable cars is absolutely nothing compared to the city which exists today. However, comparing a place like Amsterdam, it hasn't experienced anywhere near the same level of growth during that time period. Most of what is the city today was the city in the 1930s as well, before automobiles were popular. And on top of that, automobiles were never as popular in Europe for several other factors other than just pure city design. Tons of dense European cities were dense cities well before automobiles were a thing. Pointing to Amsterdam, it only added 20k people in that time period, during which LA added >6,000k. Meanwhile, most US cities have experienced these kinds of massive growth during periods when automobile access was relatively cheap and affordable for most households.
CalRobert 4y ago
What's perhaps more distressing is the fact that this comes AFTER we removed a huge chunk of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users from the equation by putting them in a car for virtually all trips. If you fill a pool with sharks then shark attack deaths will fall to 0 pretty quickly, after all! But it doesn't mean the pool is safe.
giantg2 4y ago
We know that alcohol consumption increased during these years, and that alcohol consumption plays a role in a about half of pedestrian fatalities. Seems to make sense.
rgmerk 4y ago
There's pretty good evidence to suggest that the design of American pickup trucks is at least in part to blame for this. They have much longer frontal blind spots than sedans, vans, and SUVs, and their high bonnets mean that pedestrians are hit in the head and run over, rather than being hit in the legs (not great either, but a broken leg is better than a broken brain). The ever-higher bonnets mean that these blind spots are growing, not shrinking, in never vehicles. Furthermore, many such vehicles aren't even fitted with passenger-detecting automatic emergency braking. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-dangers-of-big-trucks/ https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-danger...
chiefalchemist 4y ago
Interesting but incomplete. - State population density is too vague, what is the population density at the spot of the accident(s)? - Age of pedestrians? - Who was at fault, the driver or the ped? - Did a mobile device factor into the cause of the accident? - 2019 to 2022 feels like a small sample. - I suspect there's another study somewhere, "More People Are Getting Their Exercise by Walking." That is, it's not about population and population density but opportunities. More walked miles creates more chances for an accident.
mojosam 4y ago
In addition to bad use of statistics, this article really buries the lead, making the identification of solutions difficult. US pedestrian deaths steadily declined over 20 years from 2.6 per 100K in 1990 to 1.4 per 100K in 2010 -- a 46% decrease -- but then in the following 10 years increased to 1.96 per 100K -- a 40% increase in half the time. Furthermore, the curve is V-shaped, with the best year in 2009; it seems like some thing or things happened around 2010 that suddenly changed a long-term downward trend into a much more rapid upward trend. It's hard to see how a change in human behavior would cause such an abrupt turnaround or such a steady increase. I think what fits the data best is that this is due to a technological change, and I suspect it might be tied to sales of hybrids and EVs, which are quieter vehicles that pedestrians are less likely to be aware of, and sales of which really ramped up starting in the late 2000s. Every year, we add more of these vehicles to the roads -- which is a very good thing overall -- and that would explain why the pedestrian death rate is steadily increasing. In other words, it may be that this is not due to a change in human behavior, but rather that human behavior hasn't caught up to a technology change. In addition, it looks like NHTSA's "2015 Pedestrian and Bicyclist Data Analysis" suggests that pedestrian deaths for kids continued to decrease between 2010-2015, but that adults 50+ suffered the largest increases. In other words, the demographic that is both hardest of hearing and had the hardest time to adapt to hybrids/EVs was hit the hardest.
- h2odragon 4y ago
  this example of "bad use of statistics" is so common, especially in journalism, that it is now just "use of statistics". If you don't squeeze every last gram of hype and horror out of your numbers, you're obviously not a serious advocate fo whatever cause. > some thing or things happened around 2010 My first suspicion is another weight bump to meet safety mandates. The heaviest car sold in 1992 was lighter than the lightest car sold in 2012. F = mv^2, v hasn't changed in most of those accidents.
- paulnpace 4y ago
  I had a 2008 version of a vehicle that I replaced just this year with a 2017 version of the same vehicle. I have several times found pedestrians walking right in front of me and I slam on my brakes and the pedestrians yell at me as if I'm a negligent driver, yet previously I don't think I did such a thing more often than once every few years, if that. What I have come to discover is that the front frame rail of the 2017 is so huge it blocks my view exactly where pedestrians step off of a curb into traffic, especially because the pedestrian is elevated on the curb and completely behind the frame rail. I recognize that drivers should of course carefully inspect every intersection, but reality is that they cannot, and what pedestrians really need to do with these newer vehicles making up a larger percentage of the vehicles is make sure they can see the eyes of the driver, else the driver likely cannot see the pedestrian, at all.
efitz 4y ago
Methodological problems and misleading title aside, the article did a really poor job of explaining why there appears to be some kind of unexpected increase in pedestrian fatality rates. The only putative causes specifically mentioned were more even temporal distribution of traffic and increase in reckless driving, but no data were provided to support these assertions. It’s a BS article. (Tongue-in-cheek) maybe it was written by ChatGPT.
donatj 4y ago
I am curious how the increase in deaths compares with the rate of pedestrian accidents overall. Are accidents becoming more deadly? The changes in safety regulations have pushed these big flat front ends as being “safer” for pedestrian accidents, which is why almost every vehicle these days has the same big flat front end. It really seems to me like it would have to have the opposite effect, pushing you under the vehicle and trampling you rather than relatively more safely throwing you over.
- hbrav 4y ago
  Wait, you mean like the big 'aggressive' looking hoods on newer SUVs and pickups? I thought they were widely agreed to be dangerous to pedestrians, but drivers like them so car manufacturers make them. If you have something claiming they're safer I'd really be interested to see it. Can you link?
  - donatj 4y ago
    I have to get to sleep, but here’s a questionable source. I know I have read similar stories from more reputable outfits but I am struggling to find a link at the moment https://www.torquenews.com/1083/here-what-your-next-car-or-crossover-will-look https://www.torquenews.com/1083/here-what-your-next-car-or-c...
atlgator 4y ago
Some pedestrians are self-righteous to the point of endangerment. Yes, vehicles are legally required to stop for you, but in the event you step out into the street without verifying cars are stopping, it's only you that will wind up injured or dead. All it takes is one driver that's not familiar with their surroundings and it's over. That's a lot of risk to take for entitlement. Ask your mama why she never taught you to look both ways before crossing.
- sagarm 4y ago
  Easy solution: kill someone with your car, get the death penalty. Then the incentives are all aligned.
bluedino 4y ago
I notice more and more people walking across busy roads lately. Especially at night. And people flying around on those stupid rental scooters (do those count as pedestrians?) Why does anyone have to walk on the sidewalk? Why do people need to cross at crosswalks? Just do whatever you want, there's no repercussions.
- influx 4y ago
  I’ve seen this too, even in my suburban neighborhood, with wide brand new sidewalks, people are walking next to the sidewalk in the road. Is there some TikTok I missed?
daedlanth 4y ago
[dead]
nottorp 4y ago
Are they sure it's only pedestrians? Or it's actually the number of car accidents overall? I don't have statistics but around where i am, based on the news, everyone forgot how to drive / drove more recklessly starting with the Covid lockdowns. But it's not the number of pedestrian deaths, it's deadly car accidents overall.
emilecantin 4y ago
I've been traveling down the US east coast in a sailboat last fall, so I was a pedestrian every time I went ashore. The northern states weren't so bad in terms of safety; in Gloucester MA cars would stop to let you cross as soon as you were facing the street. In contrast, NJ was pretty bad; I had to wait for 2-3 minutes _at a crosswalk_ before I could cross because cars just wouldn't stop. At least the infrastructure was relatively good. The worst was Florida, though. There's a shocking lack of just basic infrastructure, like sidewalks stopping randomly (what am I supposed to do, take flight?) or just outright absent with no shoulder either. One time I was walking on such a street (and this was a city street, not a highway or anything) and one of these very large pickup trucks almost hit me in the face with his side mirror because he wouldn't give me space... I made a "come on" gesture in protest, and the guy stopped in the middle of the street, got out of his truck, and started berating me! As if that wasn't enough, just a few minutes later, I got honked at because I apparently wasn't crossing the intersection fast enough... But I had my pedestrian crossing light on so technically I had the right of way. There's also a disturbing lack of public transport in Florida, for example they have the "Space Coast Transportation Authority" which has a few bus routes, but none that go to the Kennedy Space Center. The car brain is unreal around these parts.
- ryukafalz 4y ago
  > NJ was pretty bad; I had to wait for 2-3 minutes _at a crosswalk_ before I could cross because cars just wouldn't stop. Grew up in NJ and just recently moved back. This checks out. It's pretty bad. > At least the infrastructure was relatively good. This is relative I suppose but we have a lot of stroads... I wouldn't say our infrastructure is good, though it depends on where in NJ I think.
  - emilecantin 4y ago
    > I wouldn't say our infrastructure is good I meant, at least there are sidewalks, designated crossings, and pedestrian lights at intersections. Can't really say the same for other states.
persedes 4y ago
Boss at a previous job in Berlin always followed the mantra that cycling is less dangerous than driving (Because heart disease). Always wondered if that still holds in the US after seeings those numbers and how dangerous roads can be if you're on a bike. Berlin wasn't all that bike friendly either, but at least you weren't the only one on a bike.
Prometheus_Lodi 4y ago
More "too old" drivers? Self driving cars? Fewer pedestrians using public transportation? And do bicycles count as pedestrians in this report?
Prometheus_Lodi 4y ago
Grim numbers no matter how much you quibble with their presentation. But WHY any increase in pedestrian deaths? Where is that discussed? 1. A aging set of drivers? 2. self-driving cars? 3. decaying road and sidewalk infrastructure? 4. daylight savings? 5. public transportation used by or available to fewer pedestrians? https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2022-11-04/how-the-daylight-saving-time-change-affects-your-state https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2022-11-04/...
- rgmerk 4y ago
  As said elsewhere, one likely contributor is pickup trucks getting higher, leading to a bigger frontal blind spot and more severe injuries when they hit people.

227 points by pasttense01 4y ago

throwaway5959 4y ago

Someone really needs to pull the plug on Tesla FSD.

sundvor 4y ago
Tesla's FSD will likely perform better than your average distracted human driver within the next few years. So, no.
- hgomersall 4y ago
  I think it was a joke.
  - firecall 4y ago
    Or maybe a yoke?
  - throwaway5959 4y ago
    It was. Oh well.

bobthepanda 4y ago

The fix is simple. Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. The EU does, and their cars kill less pedestrians. (They do a bunch of other things too, like redesign roads with reducing pedestrian collisions as a goal, which we also do a poor job of tracking.) We will not get the results we are looking for until we start actually looking for them.

chitowneats 4y ago
You're right. But our cars didn't suddenly get worse during the last 3 years. The behavioral changes we're seeing in drivers since the pandemic are very, very concerning to me. We need more understanding of this phenomenon.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  This is the full press release the article is citing: https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotlight-Full-Report22 https://www.ghsa.org/resources/news-releases/GHSA/Ped-Spotli... It's worth noting that the trend has accelerated in the last three years but we are actually up over a much longer period of time. From 2009-2019 we erased the entire decline in pedestrian deaths from 1990: https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
  - Symbiote 4y ago
    Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? That is an obvious difference with Europe. Both have much worse pedestrian safety, especially the truck. The default vehicle for someone who needs to move tools, materials etc in Europe is not a truck but a van like a Ford Transit or Mercedes Sprinter. The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. Changing either of these will take years.
    - kelnos 4y ago
      > Are there statistics on the number of SUVs and trucks on the road? I wouldn't be surprised if increasing numbers of SUVs and pickup trucks in the US is at least partly to blame for this. If you're hit by a sedan, you're likely to get thrown onto the hood, windshield, or roof of the car. If you're hit by an SUV or truck, you're much more likely to get dragged underneath, where you can get run over by the wheels. While neither situation is particularly fun, the latter is much more likely to result in death. > The other obvious difference is the huge, multi-lane roads in America, sometimes with no sidewalk. It would also be interesting to be able to classify what was happening when the pedestrian died in data like this. Were they crossing the street and a car going perpendicular ran into them? Were they crossing the street, and a car turning from the parallel street ran into them? Or were they walking along a road without a sidewalk, and a passing car hit them? Agreed that the US has a lot of wide, multi-lane roads, and poor sidewalk coverage on many roads, but I don't expect that situation has changed (for worse or better) all that much in the past few years, in a way that would explain the surge of fatalities. But anyway, to explain the increase in fatalities, my money would be on smartphones: more people driving distracted, and more pedestrians walking around buried in their phones, having no idea what's going on around them. Another posters somewhere here pointed out that pedestrian fatalities have been rising steadily since their all-time low back in 2009, which roughly coincides with the rise of smartphone adoption.
nradov 4y ago
The IIHS is looking for results. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-sedan/2023#front-crash-prevention-vehicle-to-pedestrian-day https://www.iihs.org/ratings/vehicle/acura/integra-4-door-se...
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  That is a test of collision avoidance. It does not test what actually happens in the event that a collision cannot be avoided, and the car hits the person anyways. It's also worth noting, the test only goes up to 37MPH, which is lower than common speed limits on arterial roads in suburban areas across the US. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-prevention-tests-2013-present https://www.iihs.org/ratings/about-our-tests#front-crash-pre...
Retric 4y ago
That could help, but the article is ignores the obvious. US population growth rate 2019-2022 was quite low due to the pandemic the actual increase was 18% or ~500 people from 2019. Further, working from home changed the dynamics around driving presumably a great number of people got worse because they didn’t do it as much. The numbers of pedestrians may have also increased faster than population growth rate.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  500 additional people is a lot of people, considering that as recently as 2009 the annual death total was 4109 people. https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 4y ago
    That’s for the full year this is comparing six months worth of data, and 2009 was well outside the norms. I don’t mean to downplay deaths but looking at a few datapoints may not represent a trend. Economics, weather, etc vary from year to year.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      That chart shows a decline trend from 1990-2009, and then an increase every single year after that. It’s been 13 years, at which point do we call it a trend? Especially if you compare to peer nations which have not seen the upward trend: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...
      - 4y ago
bearmode 4y ago
Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses, and generally just having smaller cars helps a huge amount. A truck hits you, you're taking the impact to your chest or upper back. A small hatchback hits you, and it's hitting your legs.
- dncornholio 4y ago
  You know what helps a huge amount? Preventing trucks even hitting pedestrians. This is the EU strength. The core safety of EU traffic is the infra, not the cars. Lighter cars and better testing is just icing on the cake.
- autoexec 4y ago
  > Don't forget significantly stricter tests for getting licenses Some states in the US stopped requiring new drivers to take a road test before being handed a license due to the pandemic. I imagine that meant a lot more people were driving who shouldn't be on the road.
fgededigo 4y ago
No, it's not simple. Changing most of a country car fleet, drastically reducing traffic, changing the infrastructure, changing the population mindset, overcome the cultural wars (this is the most important thing to change). From outside, it seems that this is part of the (new) US mythology. This is really difficult to change.
- eru 4y ago
  You don't need to do this overnight. You can change the rules for newly built (or refurbished) infrastructure only. Roads don't last forever, so if you change the rules now you'll have the pedestrian friendly infrastructure you want in 20 years, without need a big push. That's how the Dutch got (and are still getting) their infrastructure to be more human friendly.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    Right - we're still building dangerous infrastructure today. Starting to do better now is better than the status quo. It's like that quote: "The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second best time is now."
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dncornholio 4y ago
Ha, if it only was this simple. The fact that EU has less traffic deaths is not because of testing, but because of the design of all the infrastructure and more importantly; culture. Yelling at pedestrians because they are walking a zebra crossing is something I cannot comprehend. Fix the infra! Get actual good designed roads that have dedicated lanes for pedestrians and cyclers. Ban cars in city centers.
- thanatos519 4y ago
  Absolutely this! Every time I visit North America, the car-centric everything strengthens my resolve to never move back there. In Canada, I once had a visitor from Denmark who was aghast at the amount of horn honking on the roads. In Denmark the horn is to be used only in an emergency, such as the imminent threat of collision. Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn (not sure about this, it was 30 years ago). Here in The Netherlands, as a pedestrian or as a cyclist, I am regularly politely annoyed with drivers who stop for me even though they have right-of-way! This has something to do with infrastructure design, but also with the fact that most everybody is a cyclist, and of course that in any accident involving a motor vehicle and a bicycle, the motorist is by law _at least_ 50% liable.
  - consp 4y ago
    > Apparently you might get a ticket for misusing the horn Many countries have them either as part of the sound rules or separate rules (Since you live in NL, it's a separate offence a 95 euro). It used to be part of the rule standardization process but I'm not sure it still is. Somebody can correct me on that. The reason the cars stop is good since it provides more time for both drivers to get a grip of the situation and at worse limits the speed of an impact. Though due to cyclist speed increasing due to more electric bikes there is a discrepancy on older (as in more than 5 year old) cycling crossings, not all are designed for 20+kph speeds and it's hard for drivers to notice oncoming fast traffic which is in a bend (looking at you local roundabout with a hexagonal cycling path making it impossible to see cyclists further away than the section you can see due to sharp angles and larger distances created by the hexagon).
bob1029 4y ago
> Our cars kill people because we do not test for pedestrians surviving impacts. We should also look at the overall design of these damn things. Weight. Gigantic A-pillars (do we really need this many damn airbags?). Touch screens and horrible user interface design. Drive by wire removing all sense of physicality and risk (because you sure as hell don't want those new pickup truck drivers perceiving the true weight of their vehicles...). If it meant that my A-pillars could be 50% narrower, I would happily forego the protection afforded to me by those side impact airbags. In fact, if you could promise to reduce my vehicle's weight by 1000 lbs, I would forego all forms of driver-oriented protection. The tradeoffs we've made for the driver in the driver vs pedestrian game are extremely unfair in my estimation. I hate driving these "modern" vehicles.
- consp 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over and not airbags. My previous smaller car had the same airbags my new one (new ones a longer but just as narrow) has and had about half the width of the pillars, the new one is also twice as heavy (still light by US standards).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - bob1029 4y ago
    > I'm pretty sure those massive A-pillars are to avoid roof collapse during a tip-over Sounds like we are back to weight being the root evil here. Why do the cars need to weigh so much again? Are we dealing with circular reasoning at this point?
    - Retric 4y ago
      Batteries are really heavy as are high power ICE engines and drivetrain etc. The minimum weight for tires, suspension, exterior panels, frame, interior panels, seats etc isn’t that bad. But it gets worse the larger interior you want from simple scaling.
presentation 4y ago
Our cars kill people because our infrastructure is not made for human beings. The goal is not to make the cars soft and bouncy, it's to make them unnecessary.

calderknight 4y ago

The article would be more interesting if it mentioned any theories of what is behind this increase P.S. What I wonder what "equitable enforcement" means

ops 4y ago
It means they aren't enforcing anything.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
qiqitori 4y ago
They link to an article that does do that a bit: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/01/09/road-deaths-surged-alongside-covid-but-who-died-exactly/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/01/09/road-deaths-surged-al...
Symbiote 4y ago
I think it means enforcing the law to avoid causing or exacerbating inequality. Rather than ticketing 10 cyclists rolling through a stop sign on an empty intersection, or a pedestrian crossing safely but against a red light, prioritise enforcement against those causing the most danger. Vehicles speeding in residential areas, parking in a school zone where it's forbidden, etc.

timcavel 4y ago

[dead]

chmod600 4y ago

https://xkcd.com/2733/ https://xkcd.com/2733/ What a weird way to phrase a headline. From the article, it seems US population grew 2% and pedestrian deaths by 18%. But why relate those two numbers? If the US population declined by 1%, that would not really affect the story at all, but the headline would turn into nonsense. The population is stable, so it's not really important. But even if it is, you could just turn the pedestrian deaths into a per-100k number like a homicide rate.

corbulo 4y ago
I'm beginning to envy those who are well versed in xkcd
ytch 4y ago
I also didn't get the title (or my grammar is bad?) "Increased 9x Faster" means 9*Population, or (rate_now/rate_prev)=9*Population? but Population itself is not even a rate.

nicbou 4y ago

The US is downright hostile to pedestrians. Could it be that there were simply a lot more of then during the pandemic?

woile 4y ago

The fix is simple. Humans are not designed to drive at such speeds, we've been trying to correct this for decades, and still same problem, plus, we end up with horrible and empty cities. Time to switch to safer vehicles.

firecall 4y ago
In our house we love watching Dashcam Owners Australia compilation videos on YouTube. It's a very popular genre. It amuses me that future humans are going to watch these videos in amazement at how medieval and barbaric driving of cars was! Driving cars like we do is totally bonkers. Barreling down the freeways at ~100kmh with only friction brakes, our reactions and the fear of mutually assured destruction to stop of us crashing into each other. It's absolute madness. We have expended tremendous resources in making cars safer whilst never admitting that we cannot fix the real problem. Which is that humans are terrible at driving safely. We have dreadful reactions and a mass delusion that we are in full-control of the vehicle at speed!
- bbbobbb 4y ago
  This is something I think about whenever I am in a taxi/uber (don't drive, live in a city with good public transport). It's astounding that we're completely apathetic to driving at high speeds in opposite directions with clearance of meters at best. You simply put your life in the hands of hundreds of random people you pass every trip, hoping that they (intentionally or due to any tiredness, distraction or medical emergency) don't swerve in the slightest to your side and kill both of you instantly.

heavyset_go 4y ago

It'd be interesting is to see this data plotted on a map, even though, from a high level, it would probably be yet another population density map. There might be correlations with locale, demographics, environment, zoning/development, traffic engineering, etc.

danuker 4y ago
To avoid population density plots, you divide by population in each area/pixel you consider. This subreddit pokes fun at the phenomenon: https://old.reddit.com/r/PeopleLiveInCities/ https://old.reddit.com/r/PeopleLiveInCities/

sundvor 4y ago

If Americans are anything like Australians, this should surprise absolutely no-one. People are driven to distraction here, often glued to their smartphones with zero situational awareness. When this applies to both drivers and pedestrians, the outcome is predictable.

daniel_reetz 4y ago
Here in Los Angeles, I noticed a dramatic uptick in phone usage while driving over this time period. I believe the primary cause of driver and pedestrian distraction is phone usage.
girvo 4y ago
Which is why I don't blame QLD for adding their "mobile phone while driving" cameras. It's silly to me that people do. Of course that can't solve for pedestrians looking at their phones, but drivers at least should be stopped from doing so.

asgraham 4y ago

I'm absolutely behind both the message and call to action of this article; the evidence is irrefutable; this comment should not be interpreted as calling into question the headline at all: the underlying data looks solid. However. Why oh why did this author trash their own credibility by explicitly citing the "even more alarming [surge] at the state level" where "walker deaths had increased a shocking 266.67 percent in Nebraska, 150 percent in New Hampshire, and 87.5 percent in Delaware." They of course give the bare minimum caveat that "[t]hose dramatic numbers are partly explained by those states' small populations," but they are entirely explained by those states' small pedestrian fatality rates. Such as New Hampshire's increase from 2 to 5 fatalities. The other two "alarming" surges are equally unmentionable[1] in the light of actually reading the numbers. I do have to give them credit for including the relevant numbers directly in an image in the article so that I didn't have to do any digging to figure out why those states had such high increases. But that just makes me even more baffled why they didn't catch themselves. [1] Literally unmentionable, as in: those particular percentages cannot in good conscience be mentioned anywhere near a self-respecting argument for transportation reform.

chaps 4y ago
Streetsblog has a tendency to use infrequent/irrelevant traffic deaths and such to paint pictures about wider things. Things like, using hit and runs at stop signs to argue about speed limits. They did that a lot in Chicago when the city was pushing to raise the speed camera sensitivity from 10mph to 5mph. It makes it really difficult to take their writing (about genuine problems) seriously.
- drewbug01 4y ago
  > infrequent/irrelevant traffic deaths I’m all onboard the accuracy train with you, but I must say that describing any kind of traffic death as “irrelevant” seems very cold. Every person that dies on the road matters.
  - chaps 4y ago
    Of course, but when you stretch the truth, you lose the message and lose the people you need to reach the most. To me, that sort of truth stretching is way colder than I could ever be.

concordDance 4y ago

Comparing population growth rate and pedestrian death rate is a bizarre comparison. If the population growth rate was 0.5% then a 4.5% increase in pedestrian deaths isn't particularly impressive and could have many causes, such as much more people walking around due to wfh. Feels like agenda driven statistics.

ksimukka 4y ago

Recently (3 months ago), I was visiting family in Portland, OR and experienced an odd event. For context, I currently live in Oslo, Norway. As I was using a crosswalk, a Prius driver felt compelled to yell slurs at me. I can only guess that the inconvenience of having to yield to a pedestrian was some kind of trigger. Another observation was that very few pedestrians wear reflective gear. It almost seemed as if wearing dark clothes at night was intentional. I suspect that also has a negative effect on drivers as it can be extremely difficult to see pedestrians. I think pedestrian and driver safety go “hand in hand”. In Norway, pedestrians are expected to wear reflective gear and drivers are required to yield. Based on my empirical evidence, it is significantly safer walking in Oslo, Norway than in Portland, OR. I can only hope at this point that enough people come together to try and improve the safety in the states.

_Wintermute 4y ago
> the inconvenience of having to yield to a pedestrian was some kind of trigger I've experienced this in the UK as well using a zebra crossing. A driver decided to accelerate at me and then slam on the brakes as late as possible, then lean out the window to swear and tell me to get out the way. It definitely seems like extremely aggressive driving has become more common over the last few years. Not sure if it's just driving or the general attitude of people due to covid, inflation etc causing people to have shorter fuses.
- robflynn 4y ago
  The same thing happened to me recently! I had the walk indicator lit, crossing in a cross walk, someone comes speeding up to me and stopped and yelled at me to "get my ass out of the road." Someone else drove up on the sidewalk and almost hit me -- they were on their phone when it happened. People are nuts.
- tarsinge 4y ago
  My pet theory is lot of people overextended themselves due to easy financing[0] and are perpetually frustrated when driving due to the insatisfaction of getting very little of what they imagined. They are just commuting like everyone else but with an additional big bad financial decision. Pedestrians, bicycles, other drivers, everything then become an instant scapegoat for their frustration. [0]https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-14/new-car-prices-are-so-high-only-rich-americans-can-afford-them https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-14/new-car-p...

Beaver117 4y ago

Does anyone have data on car accidents the past couple years? Anecdotally everyone I talk to notices driving is much more dangerous now.

WeylandYutani 4y ago

Pedestrian as in "drove to Walmart and died on the parking lot crawling to the motorscooter from a heart attack"?

temp_acct_0xabc 4y ago

[flagged]

fsckboy 4y ago

the period of time in question here is "Covid times", which was a time of office and school closures and remote (home) school and work. Could these statistics be more influenced by pedestrians than by drivers?

xvilka 4y ago

Building public transportation is part of the answer. US should stop its unhealthy obsession with cars and build necessary infrastructure like most of the world does.

localplume 4y ago
[dead]

leonroy 4y ago

I was curious to see if the UK had a similar rise, nope a 14% fall in the same period of pedestrian deaths (slight rise in deaths of cyclists and car occupants though): https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-year-ending-june-2022/reported-road-casualties-in-great-britain-provisional-estimates-year-ending-june-2022 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... As an aside the article title is sensationalist to say the least - according to the article the US saw a 18% rise in pedestrian deaths in the same period.

contravariant 4y ago

Now hang on a minute. The title is incredibly misleading. The reason to compare pedestrian deaths to population is because more pedestrians with an equal death rate leads to more pedestrian deaths. So far the comparison is clear. What you cannot do however is to compare the relative difference in relative growth rates. That's one level of 'relative' comparison too far. Heck the population could very well have been constant over 3 years (it is decreasing in some countries) so if you're dividing some positive number by the relative population growth then you're going to end up with a bigger number, but that fact is meaningless. The phrasing suggests that the chance of getting injured has increased 9 times, but it hasn't, it's increased about 16% (the 1.18 times more deaths divided by 1.02 more people). Other than evaluating the relative risk there is no sensible reason to compare it to population, so any other calculation simply does not make sense. Unless you're willing to say it had decreased 18 times faster had the population shrunk by 1%.

didntreadarticl 4y ago
Now hang on a minute Really well earned use of 'hang on' there, sounds like the article is bollocks
- contravariant 4y ago
  Presumably the numbers are correct, but the title is statistical bullshit.
  - quickthrower2 4y ago
    Technically correct but designed to mislead. Statistical assholery.
    - dsfyu404ed 4y ago
      This sort of "lying but with some plausible deniability on top" is SOP in the world of "journalism bordering on activism", a category which the site clearly falls into whether one agrees with the policy they're peddling or not.

Idiot_in_Vain 4y ago

[flagged]

aww_dang 4y ago
Satire?
adrianN 4y ago
Interesting proposition. To my knowledge, cities tend to have democratic majorities. Cities is also where most accidents with pedestrians happen, because few pedestrians are around outside of cities.

MrBuddyCasino 4y ago

Steve Sailor makes the case that the unprecedented rises in traffic fatalities are connected to the Black Lives Matter protests and the ensuing reduction in law enforcement: https://www.unz.com/isteve/traffic-accident-deaths-up-7-year-to-date-in-q1-2022/ https://www.unz.com/isteve/traffic-accident-deaths-up-7-year...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

BigCryo 4y ago

[flagged]

darthrupert 4y ago

Just as a reminder that it doesn't have to go like this: Finland sees record low number of road traffic fatalities in 2022. https://yle.fi/a/74-20010847 https://yle.fi/a/74-20010847

phendrenad2 4y ago

Whatever the cause is, it's likely too abstract for us to attack easily. The simpler solution is probably to build more underground tunnels and over-road pedestrian bridges, and waiting for self-driving cars to become widespread.

wunderland 4y ago

A friend I knew as a child was killed last year on her bike as she commuted to work. She lived in a western US city and after her death I learned that this city has the same number of total bike deaths per year as New York City! We can argue about the statistics used by this article and the math here but it doesn’t really matter. The fact is US cities are not built for anything besides cars (with the exception of NY and maybe a few tiny downtown areas where hardly anyone lives). Urban planning on the US is a disaster and the decisions made 50 years ago amount to large, sprawling suburban areas we pretend are cities.

ryukafalz 4y ago
> The fact is US cities are not built for anything besides cars (with the exception of NY and maybe a few tiny downtown areas where hardly anyone lives). They were though, and it's a big shame that changed. I seem to recall Los Angeles had the largest streetcar system in the country.
- vel0city 4y ago
  Most cities in the US were practically small towns in comparison to the populations of today. The vast majority of most of our cities were built post 1930, with a few exceptions like NYC. In 1920 the population of LA County was about 900k. In 1950 it was 4 million. In 2020 its now 10 million. For comparison, the population of Amsterdam went from 650k in 1920 to 835k in 1950 to 872k in 2020.
  - pgodzin 4y ago
    Part of the problem is that increase in population happened in outward sprawl. There isn't anything particularly incompatible with a modernized version of that transit system at that density.
    - vel0city 4y ago
      The sprawl makes up massive chunks, if not the majority, of US cities these days, and has been so in most of what is now our cities since those areas existed. So suggesting our cities were designed for dense urban cores and it was the automobile that somehow destroyed it is revisionist IMO. Our cities experienced the vast majority of their growth when automobiles and fuel were relatively cheap, when most people weren't aware of greenhouse gasses or didn't necessarily care about the environmental impacts. So we built our cities reflecting what a lot of the population wanted at the time: automobile access. Its not like LA was a city of 10 million people in a dense urban downtown with cable cars, then GM came in and spread them all out. The city with cable cars is absolutely nothing compared to the city which exists today. However, comparing a place like Amsterdam, it hasn't experienced anywhere near the same level of growth during that time period. Most of what is the city today was the city in the 1930s as well, before automobiles were popular. And on top of that, automobiles were never as popular in Europe for several other factors other than just pure city design. Tons of dense European cities were dense cities well before automobiles were a thing. Pointing to Amsterdam, it only added 20k people in that time period, during which LA added >6,000k. Meanwhile, most US cities have experienced these kinds of massive growth during periods when automobile access was relatively cheap and affordable for most households.

CalRobert 4y ago

What's perhaps more distressing is the fact that this comes AFTER we removed a huge chunk of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users from the equation by putting them in a car for virtually all trips. If you fill a pool with sharks then shark attack deaths will fall to 0 pretty quickly, after all! But it doesn't mean the pool is safe.

giantg2 4y ago

We know that alcohol consumption increased during these years, and that alcohol consumption plays a role in a about half of pedestrian fatalities. Seems to make sense.

rgmerk 4y ago

There's pretty good evidence to suggest that the design of American pickup trucks is at least in part to blame for this. They have much longer frontal blind spots than sedans, vans, and SUVs, and their high bonnets mean that pedestrians are hit in the head and run over, rather than being hit in the legs (not great either, but a broken leg is better than a broken brain). The ever-higher bonnets mean that these blind spots are growing, not shrinking, in never vehicles. Furthermore, many such vehicles aren't even fitted with passenger-detecting automatic emergency braking. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-dangers-of-big-trucks/ https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/the-hidden-danger...

chiefalchemist 4y ago

Interesting but incomplete. - State population density is too vague, what is the population density at the spot of the accident(s)? - Age of pedestrians? - Who was at fault, the driver or the ped? - Did a mobile device factor into the cause of the accident? - 2019 to 2022 feels like a small sample. - I suspect there's another study somewhere, "More People Are Getting Their Exercise by Walking." That is, it's not about population and population density but opportunities. More walked miles creates more chances for an accident.

mojosam 4y ago

In addition to bad use of statistics, this article really buries the lead, making the identification of solutions difficult. US pedestrian deaths steadily declined over 20 years from 2.6 per 100K in 1990 to 1.4 per 100K in 2010 -- a 46% decrease -- but then in the following 10 years increased to 1.96 per 100K -- a 40% increase in half the time. Furthermore, the curve is V-shaped, with the best year in 2009; it seems like some thing or things happened around 2010 that suddenly changed a long-term downward trend into a much more rapid upward trend. It's hard to see how a change in human behavior would cause such an abrupt turnaround or such a steady increase. I think what fits the data best is that this is due to a technological change, and I suspect it might be tied to sales of hybrids and EVs, which are quieter vehicles that pedestrians are less likely to be aware of, and sales of which really ramped up starting in the late 2000s. Every year, we add more of these vehicles to the roads -- which is a very good thing overall -- and that would explain why the pedestrian death rate is steadily increasing. In other words, it may be that this is not due to a change in human behavior, but rather that human behavior hasn't caught up to a technology change. In addition, it looks like NHTSA's "2015 Pedestrian and Bicyclist Data Analysis" suggests that pedestrian deaths for kids continued to decrease between 2010-2015, but that adults 50+ suffered the largest increases. In other words, the demographic that is both hardest of hearing and had the hardest time to adapt to hybrids/EVs was hit the hardest.

h2odragon 4y ago
this example of "bad use of statistics" is so common, especially in journalism, that it is now just "use of statistics". If you don't squeeze every last gram of hype and horror out of your numbers, you're obviously not a serious advocate fo whatever cause. > some thing or things happened around 2010 My first suspicion is another weight bump to meet safety mandates. The heaviest car sold in 1992 was lighter than the lightest car sold in 2012. F = mv^2, v hasn't changed in most of those accidents.
paulnpace 4y ago
I had a 2008 version of a vehicle that I replaced just this year with a 2017 version of the same vehicle. I have several times found pedestrians walking right in front of me and I slam on my brakes and the pedestrians yell at me as if I'm a negligent driver, yet previously I don't think I did such a thing more often than once every few years, if that. What I have come to discover is that the front frame rail of the 2017 is so huge it blocks my view exactly where pedestrians step off of a curb into traffic, especially because the pedestrian is elevated on the curb and completely behind the frame rail. I recognize that drivers should of course carefully inspect every intersection, but reality is that they cannot, and what pedestrians really need to do with these newer vehicles making up a larger percentage of the vehicles is make sure they can see the eyes of the driver, else the driver likely cannot see the pedestrian, at all.

efitz 4y ago

Methodological problems and misleading title aside, the article did a really poor job of explaining why there appears to be some kind of unexpected increase in pedestrian fatality rates. The only putative causes specifically mentioned were more even temporal distribution of traffic and increase in reckless driving, but no data were provided to support these assertions. It’s a BS article. (Tongue-in-cheek) maybe it was written by ChatGPT.

donatj 4y ago

I am curious how the increase in deaths compares with the rate of pedestrian accidents overall. Are accidents becoming more deadly? The changes in safety regulations have pushed these big flat front ends as being “safer” for pedestrian accidents, which is why almost every vehicle these days has the same big flat front end. It really seems to me like it would have to have the opposite effect, pushing you under the vehicle and trampling you rather than relatively more safely throwing you over.

hbrav 4y ago
Wait, you mean like the big 'aggressive' looking hoods on newer SUVs and pickups? I thought they were widely agreed to be dangerous to pedestrians, but drivers like them so car manufacturers make them. If you have something claiming they're safer I'd really be interested to see it. Can you link?
- donatj 4y ago
  I have to get to sleep, but here’s a questionable source. I know I have read similar stories from more reputable outfits but I am struggling to find a link at the moment https://www.torquenews.com/1083/here-what-your-next-car-or-crossover-will-look https://www.torquenews.com/1083/here-what-your-next-car-or-c...

atlgator 4y ago

Some pedestrians are self-righteous to the point of endangerment. Yes, vehicles are legally required to stop for you, but in the event you step out into the street without verifying cars are stopping, it's only you that will wind up injured or dead. All it takes is one driver that's not familiar with their surroundings and it's over. That's a lot of risk to take for entitlement. Ask your mama why she never taught you to look both ways before crossing.

sagarm 4y ago
Easy solution: kill someone with your car, get the death penalty. Then the incentives are all aligned.

bluedino 4y ago

I notice more and more people walking across busy roads lately. Especially at night. And people flying around on those stupid rental scooters (do those count as pedestrians?) Why does anyone have to walk on the sidewalk? Why do people need to cross at crosswalks? Just do whatever you want, there's no repercussions.

influx 4y ago
I’ve seen this too, even in my suburban neighborhood, with wide brand new sidewalks, people are walking next to the sidewalk in the road. Is there some TikTok I missed?

daedlanth 4y ago

[dead]

nottorp 4y ago

Are they sure it's only pedestrians? Or it's actually the number of car accidents overall? I don't have statistics but around where i am, based on the news, everyone forgot how to drive / drove more recklessly starting with the Covid lockdowns. But it's not the number of pedestrian deaths, it's deadly car accidents overall.

emilecantin 4y ago

I've been traveling down the US east coast in a sailboat last fall, so I was a pedestrian every time I went ashore. The northern states weren't so bad in terms of safety; in Gloucester MA cars would stop to let you cross as soon as you were facing the street. In contrast, NJ was pretty bad; I had to wait for 2-3 minutes _at a crosswalk_ before I could cross because cars just wouldn't stop. At least the infrastructure was relatively good. The worst was Florida, though. There's a shocking lack of just basic infrastructure, like sidewalks stopping randomly (what am I supposed to do, take flight?) or just outright absent with no shoulder either. One time I was walking on such a street (and this was a city street, not a highway or anything) and one of these very large pickup trucks almost hit me in the face with his side mirror because he wouldn't give me space... I made a "come on" gesture in protest, and the guy stopped in the middle of the street, got out of his truck, and started berating me! As if that wasn't enough, just a few minutes later, I got honked at because I apparently wasn't crossing the intersection fast enough... But I had my pedestrian crossing light on so technically I had the right of way. There's also a disturbing lack of public transport in Florida, for example they have the "Space Coast Transportation Authority" which has a few bus routes, but none that go to the Kennedy Space Center. The car brain is unreal around these parts.

ryukafalz 4y ago
> NJ was pretty bad; I had to wait for 2-3 minutes _at a crosswalk_ before I could cross because cars just wouldn't stop. Grew up in NJ and just recently moved back. This checks out. It's pretty bad. > At least the infrastructure was relatively good. This is relative I suppose but we have a lot of stroads... I wouldn't say our infrastructure is good, though it depends on where in NJ I think.
- emilecantin 4y ago
  > I wouldn't say our infrastructure is good I meant, at least there are sidewalks, designated crossings, and pedestrian lights at intersections. Can't really say the same for other states.

persedes 4y ago

Boss at a previous job in Berlin always followed the mantra that cycling is less dangerous than driving (Because heart disease). Always wondered if that still holds in the US after seeings those numbers and how dangerous roads can be if you're on a bike. Berlin wasn't all that bike friendly either, but at least you weren't the only one on a bike.

Prometheus_Lodi 4y ago

More "too old" drivers? Self driving cars? Fewer pedestrians using public transportation? And do bicycles count as pedestrians in this report?

Prometheus_Lodi 4y ago

Grim numbers no matter how much you quibble with their presentation. But WHY any increase in pedestrian deaths? Where is that discussed? 1. A aging set of drivers? 2. self-driving cars? 3. decaying road and sidewalk infrastructure? 4. daylight savings? 5. public transportation used by or available to fewer pedestrians? https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2022-11-04/how-the-daylight-saving-time-change-affects-your-state https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2022-11-04/...

rgmerk 4y ago
As said elsewhere, one likely contributor is pickup trucks getting higher, leading to a bigger frontal blind spot and more severe injuries when they hit people.