8 ms·

Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?

• websiteapi 1y ago
  I had a suspicion that there were more idiots on the road after and during covid. good to see this reflected in the data, but sad to know that it's actually true. no matter where I go in the USA I see people speeding easily 50% over the limit, running red lights, blowing through stop signs. it's ridiculous. given how many people die I'm surprised government's having made safety technology mandatory. things like toyota safety sense are pretty effective - you can check on youtube. people will place random dummys in front of the car and it stops pretty accurately.
  • Toorkit 1y ago
    Not just the US, my village in Germany has a limit of 30 kph, people drive through with 60.
    • pixl97 1y ago
      Have the village start adding some wicked speed bumps.
      • cedilla 1y ago
        Speed bumps work but putting big flower pots in the way is even better. It forces people to slow down without giving them the feeling that they get slowed down for no reason. We humans are so easy to trick.
    • physicsguy 1y ago
      We're 30mph through my village but because it is a 'cut through' the local government deem it to be important and the speed cannot be reduced. Even though we had two cars go round a sharp bend into a tree within a month of each other, in dry conditions.
    • pmontra 1y ago
      Not Germany here but I witnessed buses of the bus company of my former city driving at 50 or more in a 30 km/h area. Some of those areas have a 30 limit because of a good reason, some probably only to add up kilometers and make the city council look good.
  • sumtechguy 1y ago
    Then to add to that I see every single day people walking doing silly things and walking into the roads where they should not be. One dude I saw just a few days ago was crossing an interstate (see that about 2-3 times a month in the same place). I see jwalking pretty much every day. I see people walking when the signal says to stay put. I see people darting out from between parked cars. I see this every day. Sure they have priority. But a car doing 55 does not care. Keep your head on a swivel. I make sure I cross at the places designated to do so and also make sure there are no cars coming at that moment because some fool decided that was the perfect time to play with their phone.
    • pixl97 1y ago
      A lot of this is parked cars right beside a 55mph highway. Or stretches of stroad that are a mile long with no pedestrian crossings. In the US we love to zone that 'business over here' and 'residentials over there' which means you have to cross high traffic areas to do anything. And if you're without car you're rightly screwed.
    • ceejayoz 1y ago
      But most of these issues are highlighting road/driver issues, not pedestrian ones. People jaywalk because the lights are timed more for the convenience of the drivers. People dart out between parked cars because the nearest crosswalk is a long way away. People cross the interstate because otherwise their 5 minute walk becomes an hour. Drivers shouldn't be going 55 in spots where someone can be obscured by a row of parked cars. etc.
    • nekusar 1y ago
      There's a LOT going on with what you said. Im going to separate it for logical discussion and not the order you said it in. > I see jwalking pretty much every day. Jaywalking was a created crime by the early car companies to try to take away blame from distracted drivers. https://www.grunge.com/721704/the-truth-about-how-jaywalking-became-a-crime/ https://www.grunge.com/721704/the-truth-about-how-jaywalking... says it better than I. > One dude I saw just a few days ago was crossing an interstate (see that about 2-3 times a month in the same place). That IS a problem. However, what is the locality doing to fixing an obvious problem of 'nowhere to safely cross a high speed road'? Aside "fuckit, cross halfway when it looks safe" is basically the only sane response. WALKING up or down an interstate or major highway to get to a light or some crossing way would take 1+ hours to do. > Then to add to that I see every single day people walking doing silly things and walking into the roads where they should not be. Are they actually obstructing, or just crossing and you don't like that? > I see people walking when the signal says to stay put. So in my liberal-ish city in a republican state, we have basically terrible cargo-cult traffic control. They do shit like "dont turn on pedestrian lights when nobody presses the button", no right-turn on reds even if theres no ped crossing, arbitrary bad speed control, stuff like that. On the city square, its routine to see no cars cause the lights are anti-timed to impede cars. BUT the light will be green allowing all those cars (NONE!) to continue. So yeah, we look the 1 way - its a 1 way road - and we will cross when we're not supposed to. Again, this is what happens when you mix blaming pedestrians, poor traffic handling, and cargo cult liberal ideas all together. Makes a terrible situation for everyone. > I see people darting out from between parked cars. Again, goes back to car companies criminalizing "jaywalking", in order to steer the blame to humans rather than humans driving a 1 ton slab of metal and plastic. > But a car doing 55 does not care. Ah hah! And there's the gotcha. You're not talking about downtown and slower streets, like city residential or the city square. You're talking about Stroads, this bastardized terrible mix between a street (slow, humans everywhere) and a road (high speed, no humans, limited entry/exit). Not Just Bikes talks extensively about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM Yes, Stroads kill. And Stroads are EVERYWHERE in the USA. This US-centric anti-pattern is best seen with a state highway going 55MPH, maybe dropping to 40-45MPH with a town built AROUND this bisecting nigh-uncrossable stroad. They are some of the most anti-human infrastructure we have seen. > I make sure I cross at the places designated to do so and also make sure there are no cars coming at that moment because some fool decided that was the perfect time to play with their phone. Thats the problem with stroads and the highways that bifurcate towns and cities. There's FEW places to cross, and the lights themselves are almost never set up to actually allow pedestrian traffic. And you're lucky to even get a sidewalk. And if you do, your door prize is face full of vehicles fumes and super loud vehicles. The USA has sold off and demolished pedestrian infrastructure for implicitly requiring everyone have a motor vehicle, unless you're lucky enough to live in a rare city with great public infra. (And no, bus lines that share the road with regular vehicles will take you 2 hours to get where your car can take you 20 minutes.)
  • bombcar 1y ago
    I’d like someone to do a deep dive in the data; I suspect that almost all of the fatalities involve some variation of “not following the laws” simply because nobody does. We need crosswalks enforced by spikes that pop up from the ground or something similarly draconian to get people to wake up. The US mostly (but not completely) solved the school bus problem (people passing a bus dropping off children) by having exceptionally hard penalties and enforcing them significantly for the first few months. A similar nation-wide campaign is needed around auto safety.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      >The US mostly (but not completely) solved the school bus problem (people passing a bus dropping off children) by having exceptionally hard penalties and enforcing them significantly for the first few months. They also changed bus routing best practice to alter the sorts of stops that were causing the bulk of the passing. Like for example right side stops on roads divided by any sort of median are avoided where possible these days.
      • bombcar 1y ago
        That also had the side effect of moving the stops to side streets; rarely if ever are the “commuting roads” stopped by schoolbusses anymore. Which makes it nicer tot drive, too.
        • potato3732842 1y ago
          The side streets are a better place for kids/parents to be waiting around too.
  • myrmidon 1y ago
    > there were more idiots on the road after and during covid I don't think the data really supports this, because pedestrian deaths have been rising continuously since 2008 instead of abruptly after 2019; there is at least a bunch of other factors at play. Most suprising to me was the sharp rise in the "pedestrians on drugs" quota. Personally, I think that "more distracted pedestrians" (from smartphones) is also an interesting theory which could possibly explain the huge increase in Sedan-lethality.
    • rsynnott 1y ago
      > Most suprising to me was the sharp rise in the "pedestrians on drugs" quota. I'd be cautious of reading _too_ much into that, because in that time period the US has largely legalised a popular drug. You'd expect this rate to rise just because a cop asking "were you using cannabis" in the US is now a very different threat level than it was 20 years ago.
• bradfa 1y ago
  Pedestrians are hit by cars in the USA because the roads are not designed for non-car users. This is exacerbated by distracted driving, drunk driving, and recent car design changes like higher hood heights but the root of it is poorly designed roads which don’t consider pedestrians’ needs.
  • quantumwannabe 1y ago
    Someone didn't read the article.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      >Someone didn't read the article. Someone doesn't understand that any article that's drawing conclusions based on a workflow that involves putting a Chevy Suburban (functionally a chevy pickup from the B pillar forward) and a Honda HRV into the same category is sus at best and anyone uncritically accepting said conclusions is also sus at best. If one wanted to be honest they'd look at GVW or some other metric that tracks size far more closely than a fairly arbitrary categorization that is highly gamed for regulatory reasons. We're all just so sick of these shallow analysis. Shitting numbers and graphs onto them doesn't make them not shallow. Like what even is the point of a raw "deaths by state" map?[1]? [1] https://xkcd.com/1138/ https://xkcd.com/1138/
      • willis936 1y ago
        Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and SUVs" to make this less ambiguous.
        • potato3732842 1y ago
          >Suburbans are on truck chassis and are SUVs. HRVs are on car chassis and are crossovers. The bucket is called "trucks and SUVs" to make this less ambiguous. TFA does not use data broken down in that way. TFA cites "sales by body type" which puts a 'Burb (functionally a pickup for this discussion) into the same category as a 2002 Forester (which is an SUV on paper, but obviously a car).
• hackingonempty 1y ago
  It is literally 20 times as many people killed every year as are killed in mass shootings but you can't get anyone to care at all about it. Blame the victim, did you see what they were wearing?
  • cindyllm 1y ago
    [dead]
  • rjbwork 1y ago
    Even moreso than guns, the automobile industry has been waging an incredibly successful propaganda campaign for over a century now equating the ownership and use of a personal automobile with freedom.
    • snapcaster 1y ago
      This is true, people having a complete meltdown to the idea of walkable cities was very telling
      • potato3732842 1y ago
        It's because it's being peddled by the same "oh, I know how we'll use government to fix this problem that isn't top 10 on anyone's list" types who's in previous generations gave us unwalkable cities, unaffordable housing, and the modern urban-suburban hellscape. While individual points are supported or resisted individually and by individuals, when you sum it up on a population level it's like a gut reaction against listening to someone who's lead you astray before. Basically the people pushing changes lack the political and cultural capital to see them through because the capital was wasted for naught in decades past.
    • deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
      Have you tried to move around US w/o it? As propaganda goes, it is pretty spot on.
• uniqueuid 1y ago
  An interesting read. This kind of problem is exactly what statistics is designed to do, and it makes me a bit sad that we are left with a bit of a shoulder shrug. It's absolutely possible to do a much better job at disentangling possible causes here with something as simple as a multilevel regression. (Although ok, proper causal inference would be more work).
• contrarian1234 1y ago
  They forgot to check if it correlates with shark attacks They checked so many things I'm surprised it didn't match something just by accident (it's still a fun exercise :)) mostly just teasing)
• 36Ndm 1y ago
  Also if you look at they way the cars are designed in the US compared to Europe, the hoods of the cars are much higher, and not designed to prevent injury in the event of a car -> pedestraion incident
  • sethammons 1y ago
    In the article, it talks about the big suv hypothesis and also points out that pedestrian deaths are up for sedans too. Are US sedans hood designs different than in Europe?
    • 36Ndm 1y ago
      I think it is more common to have larger cars in the US versus europe, I saw a dodge ram for the first time in my life yesterday and me and my colleagues were shocked at how big it was - it did not fit in a regular parking space and took a whole handicap spot. I don't think us sedan design is different from european, but just the car culture as a whole.
    • apothegm 1y ago
      If you look at sedans from the early 90s, their front bumpers (and especially the bumper extensions that used to exist on most sedans, and which would be the first part to hit) would hit someone my height at or below the knee. Current sedans would hit me on the low to mid-thigh. That makes a meaningful difference in whether the pedestrian goes over or under the hood after being struck and has a massive impact (pun unintended) on injury severity, likelihood of head injuries, etc. One other thing that’s changed for both SUVs and sedans is that for the sake of occupant safety, the pillars are MUCH wider than they were in cars built 35 years ago. The impact on visibility is massive, and those pillars are generally placed to directly obstruct the view of pedestrians in or waiting to enter a crosswalk when the driver wants to turn through it.
• everdrive 1y ago
  There are a multitude of issues: - poor visibility in modern cars due to rollover protection - touch screens and touch controls in cars - general proliferation of controls in cars - smart phones & smart phone addictions - higher vehicle belt lines are better for vehicle --> vehicle impacts but worse for vehicle --> pedestrian impacts - poor pedestrian infrastructure, sidewalks, crosswalks, etc.
  • octo888 1y ago
    How have touchscreens had such a free pass compared to mobile phones?! Just kidding I know the answer is lobbying
  • strickjb9 1y ago
    I hung onto a Blackberry way longer than I should have simply because I wanted physical keys. I'm trying to hang onto cars with physical controls as well. It seems like automakers are finally get the hint that people want physical controls again.
  • pmontra 1y ago
    But why only in the USA? Cars and phones are the same in all the countries listed in the OP and it's not SUVs vs sedans. So are we left with your last point, different infrastructure?
    • throwaway984393 1y ago
      [dead]
    • dboreham 1y ago
      Different people.
• paulcole 1y ago
  The answer is so simple. We really really really really like our cars/trucks/SUVs in the US and have agreed that about 30,000 to 40,000 people a year will die so that we can keep driving the way we do. It’s the price we pay for the way we choose to live.
  • octo888 1y ago
    I'd love more of this kind of frank discourse because I'm tired of decades of political pearl clutching "even just one death is a tragedy"
  • alterom 1y ago
    I like how your comment is downvoted even though this hypothesis is directly supported by the data from the article. Fat cars getting fatter, pedestrian-hostile streets becoming faster, city infrastructure requiring people to drive everywhere. Hmmmm, what could be the reason.
    • potato3732842 1y ago
      >I like how your comment is downvoted even though this hypothesis is directly supported by the data from the article. I like (by which I mean I think it indicates a lack of moral character) that you say this despite the articles conclusion basically being "the data is all over the place, I see no strong trends <sigh> I guess it's the SUVs, ugh, maybe" Like yeah, it probably is the SUVs to an extent but the data only indirectly supports this at best and there's probably confounding factors (in particular road design which has been discussed at length and people all over these commands are bringing up).
      • alterom 1y ago
        >I like (by which I mean I think it indicates a lack of moral character) This isn't coherent, sorry. >that you say this despite the articles conclusion being... Notice that I said that the hypothesis is supported by the data presented in the article, not by the lackluster analysis (or the conclusion, which, nevertheless, does point to SUVs as the only hypothesis they find plausible). >the data is all over the place, I see no strong trends <sigh> I guess it's the SUVs, ugh, maybe" This is a bad and misleading summary of the article. >Like yeah, it probably is the SUVs to an extent but the data only indirectly supports this at best and there's probably confounding factors (in particular road design which has been discussed at length and people all over these commands are bringing up). You missed the entire point of the article, which is trying to understand why the rate of pedestrian fatalities spiked after 2009 in the US (but not in the EU). Road design, BY ITSELF, isn't the cause of the spike, since IT DID NOT CHANGE. The speed limits did go up in many places in the US, something that I brought up in another comment (and something that was glossed over by the article). That may be a factor. But the primary factor is the elephant in the room - cars getting bigger, heavier, taller, and more hostile to pedestrians. It's the goddamn obvious conclusion, and all the data out there supports it: https://www.npr.org/2023/11/14/1212737005/cars-trucks-pedestrian-deaths-increase-crash-data https://www.npr.org/2023/11/14/1212737005/cars-trucks-pedest...
• furyg3 1y ago
  At first I thought maybe the number of pedestrian journeys have gone up, but that appears to be declining (leading to even more concern as to why deaths have gone up).
  • codeduck 1y ago
    Because (darkly) there's one fewer pedestrians time one of them gets killed? Sorry, I'll show myself out.
    • alterom 1y ago
      There's many more pedestrians who start to think twice about walking anywhere after someone they know is hit by a vehicle.
• barrenko 1y ago
  Pedestrians are quite squishy.
• shusaku 1y ago
  > We also can’t rule out that increased recklessness or distractedness on the part of pedestrians is playing a role. Or a raw increase in pedestrians on urban roads? Maybe people are more willing to go on a walk at night in the city these days?
  • everdrive 1y ago
    Anecdotal, but I've been in some cities where pedestrians don't even look, they just walk right into the road. Yes, I would be at fault if I hit them (in many cases) but I'm also not perfect, and also don't expect them to charge right in front of me.)
    • pretzellogician 1y ago
      Living in Boston 30-something years ago, I found this was required as a pedestrian, because drivers would try to intimidate you from entering a crosswalk by accelerating at you. So... you had to explicitly look away and still be aware of their presence. (Not just Boston, I've seen this in some other cities since.)
      • throwaway173738 1y ago
        This is how it works everywhere I’ve been.
    • piva00 1y ago
      One of the reasons to force slower speeds in city streets, more time for reacting to adverse events, less damage in case you hit a pedestrian at 30km/h than 60km/h.
• softwaredoug 1y ago
  Where I live they will randomly build a bike path for a mile on the side of the road. But then it just ends. There's not a sense of how it could be built to connect people to the places they need to go. It's random and ad-hoc. Then people say "its pointless to build bike / ped infrastructure, nobody uses it!"
  • AaronAPU 1y ago
    Around here, there seems to be an unwritten rule that every place a trail crosses the road there must be a row of 20’ tall shrub blocking the entire line of visibility in both directions.
  • alterom 1y ago
    My favorite feature of bicycle lanes in San Jose is that cars cross them diagonally to get onto highway access ramps. Nothing screams "safety" like an SUV coming at you from behind and left while accelerating to highway speeds.
  • danbolt 1y ago
    I’ve lived in places where they’ll add the bike path during scheduled road work, as it’s cheaper to get it done while there’s a crew already onsite. It can be a bit stochastic at first like you mention, but over a while I’ve seen the corridor eventually fill out, making the most of a shoestring budget. Perhaps something similar where you live?
  • globular-toast 1y ago
    This is a huge problem where I live too. The thing is, technically, everyone is equally connected, because people have a legal right of way on all roads using any means of transport (apart from motorways, but these are always redundant links). But practically, most routes are unsafe and just downright unpleasant to use in anything but a motorvehicle. I don't know what metrics they are using to assess walking or cycling infrastructure, but it seems like it's just raw miles of pavement/tarmac. This is a useless metric. You can have 10 miles of pristine cycle path but if it goes nowhere it's not useful and nobody will use it. The metrics need to be based on graph completeness. Important places are the nodes. You get to draw an edge if there's a reasonable route that is less than, say, 150% of the crow flies distance (or some more clever formula taking into account gradients etc., ie. it's allowed to be longer if it means not including a 25% gradient). Then your score is simply number of edges divided by number of edges in the complete graph (or 2E/(N^2*N) where E is number of edges and N number of places).
• 33a 1y ago
  Pedestrians on phones, not drivers on phones.
• deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
• strickjb9 1y ago
  Great analysis - though I can't help but notice that 2009 is right when smartphones really took off (iPhone in 2007, Android in 2008, then mass adoption). The data showing accidents getting more deadly rather than more frequent actually makes sense if you combine two factors: phones causing more distracted driving incidents, plus our bigger American vehicles turning what would be injuries elsewhere into deaths. That could explain why it's US-specific - other countries probably have the same phone distraction problem, but their smaller cars mean less fatal outcomes. The distraction data might be weak simply because people don't admit they were on their phone after killing someone, but sometimes the obvious answer deserves more weight than we give it.
  • throwaway173738 1y ago
    You do see the “not reported “ category trend up significantly on the graph which suggests you may be right. I might report that I wasn’t distracted, but I would not report if I was distracted because I might end up in jail.
• banga 1y ago
  This morning while jogging in the US I came to an intersection. Green lights and walk on in my direction. A car approaching from my left had a red light, the driver glanced to his left and without stopping or looking in my direction, turned right across my path. I expected this of course, so avoided being run over. If I wasn't watching for this, it likely would be a different outcome. So why do so many pedestrians get killed in the US? The two main reasons to me are: 1. Drivers don't look for pedestrians, and 2. pedestrians expect drivers to follow rules. Another contributing factor is of course the huge vehicles that crush people with drivers barely noticing...
  • softwaredoug 1y ago
    Right turns are really dangerous for pedestrians. A lot of localities started banning right-on-red because cars look left only.
    • tbrownaw 1y ago
      There's an intersection here where the crosswalk button lights up a "no right turn" light hanging next to the usual stoplights.
      • mitthrowaway2 1y ago
        That's brilliant. I just wish the crosswalk button could pop up some bollards too.
    • karma_fountain 1y ago
      Cars don't look at all.
      • teytra 1y ago
        Quite a few modern cars do. Drivers often don't, so it might be an improvement.
      • softwaredoug 1y ago
• alterom 1y ago
  One obvious direction not explored in the article: looking not just at the type on the vehicle involved in the deadly collision, but also the actual model and its geometry. It's not just that SUVs are deadlier than sedans. It's also that the sedans are becoming taller, wider, heavier — and deadlier. The article says that blunt fronts are what makes a collision more likely to result in a death. Well compare a 2000 Camry to a 2025 one then on that metric. To test this hypothesis, we need to look at all accidents where a pedestrian was hit — and see a breakdown on whether it resulted in a fatality, by vehicle and road type. Another thing the article doesn't consider is that the speed limits have increased across the US, and where they haven't, the enforcement is not necessarily there (cough Bay Area cough). Solutions like lane diet (or engineering cities for anything other than automobiles) never became popular. The outcome is inevitable. _____ TL;DR: bigger, fatter cars going faster kill more people.
  • throwaway173738 1y ago
    This is another important point. A pillars are two or three times the size. That’s twice the amount of metal in your field of view where you would be looking for a pedestrian.
• al_borland 1y ago
  I don’t buy the distraction numbers. I see people on their phones constantly while driving, despite laws against it. It’s also impossible to really prove anything after the fact, as the article touches on. The graph shows a massive increase in “distraction not reported,” which to me just sounds like the driver didn’t choose to incriminate themself. The spike started in 2010, which is when 4G was rolling out, Instagram launched, Facebook was already big, and social media in your pocket was becoming an addictive reality. Before this, there wasn’t a lot to do on a smartphone while driving.
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    Any attempt to blame it primarily on phones has to wrangle with the fact that those phones are available and in use everywhere on the planet, not just the USA.
    • shusaku 1y ago
      My only critique of this is that maybe the countries they compared started to invested in safer urban driving infrastructure during the Lehman shock, and its counteracting the universal growth in distractedness
    • mrweasel 1y ago
      I was thinking the same, but many other countries have drivers and pedestrians more separated, to while the distraction, from either the driver or the pedestrians is still a problem, it's mitigated by the greater distance between the two. Still the "on drug or drunk" for the pedestrians is wild.
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    If it was phone-related, you'd expect it to have risen everywhere, but in fact it has generally fallen modestly in most OECD countries, and risen massively in the US.
• heresie-dabord 1y ago
  Since 1930, 30K or more people have been killed every year in car accidents in the US. That's over 3_000_000 people in the past 100 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year#By_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in... (corrected, thanks!)
  • ReptileMan 1y ago
    30000*100 != 30 000 000 are you sure you haven't thrown a zero somewhere when multiplying.
  • blipvert 1y ago
    Um, 3 million, perhaps? Technically over 300k, I guess.
• micromacrofoot 1y ago
  in other countries at an intersection with a stoplight... is it normal for the light to turn green (allowing for a right turn) while a crosswalk also simultaneously activates to cross that path? this always feels strange to me in some US cities... why would you give a car a green light to turn into an active crosswalk? I've been honked at by drivers like I'm doing something wrong while having a cross signal
  • pmontra 1y ago
    That's the standard way stoplights work in Italy. Cars have to yield to pedestrians so it's common to see cars start the right turn and then wait in a line until all pedestrians have crossed the street.
• Frieren 1y ago
  Road and street design is the main difference with Europe. A lot of work has been put to make streets safer for everybody. That fact alone acts as a multiplier for everything else. The cars are bigger in the USA? The bad streets make it way worse. People are distracted at the phone? The bad street design makes it more deathly. Fix USA's streets and towns and all kinds of deaths will be decreased. It is the most important factor.
  • pluc 1y ago
    This blows my mind considering most North American streets were designed for cars, whereas the same cannot be said for Europe. Maybe it's the reason: streets can be so narrow and winding in Europe that you have to pay attention?
    • thunderfork 1y ago
      [dead]
    • lksaar 1y ago
      Yea, I read an article on here a few years ago (which I can't seem to find anymore), that a lot more cars in the US crash into buildings compared to the EU and the main takeaway point was that it is probably because of the long and straight roads in the US, since you go faster and aren't as focused.
• fennecfoxy 1y ago
  Culture.
  • kode95 1y ago
    I'm not sure why you're being downvoted. While car size and roads play a part in this problem, so does culture. And while the US culture is diverse and mixed, culture - in this case people's approach to driving - does play a part in this.
    • fennecfoxy 1y ago
      Probably because I was brief. And here I thought it proved I'm not an LLM ha ha.
• astonex 1y ago
  Anecdotally, on my few visits to the US (NY and Colorado), the driving I saw was absolutely atrocious compared to Europe. People were swerving and failing to stay in their lanes on Interstates, everyone was speeding well above the limit (everyone speeds on Motorways, but it seems it's taken to another level in the US). Then you have turn right on red meaning drivers just don't care and turn regardless. Then you have everyone driving massive fucking trucks where you can't see anything from inside. It seemed every morning I got up and turned on the hotel TV, there was another news about some crash on the Interstate that morning
  • tomasphan 1y ago
    Totally agree. When someone in my family got their license in the US they had to drive around a parking lot, parallel park and pull into a normal parking lot. That’s it. This was during COVID so the tester wasn’t allowed inside the car. It absolutely reflects in the quality of drivers today. I often drive in Europe for business and cry a little on the inside when I’m back on New York streets.
  • Hikikomori 1y ago
    It's a pretty good way to inflate GDP.
  • dboreham 1y ago
    A difference I haven't seen mentioned here is: the police. In the US there's a melange of different police forces in any area. Only one of them (Highway Patrol) cares about driving. And in my experience they don't care much about anything pre-accident (except for revenue-raising efforts like speed tickets for 10mph over the limit). E.g. in the US you'll see countless vehicles with one headlight not working. In the UK (at least when I last lived there) you'd be pulled over and fined for even headlights that aren't correctly aimed.
• braza 1y ago
  As an enthusiast of traffic engineering, the most surprising thing in US is how hard is for the engineers to handle so distinct zoning laws according to it's county/city/state, and urbanistic planning in several big/medium cities is more centered on _giving preference to the cars_ instead of _keep the cadency and flow of the cars_. Not saying it's good or bad, but for instance, in some counties it's way simpler to have a parking lot without any traffic buffer area at the entrance than to get an approval for a roundabout to reduce electronic traffic coordination in feeder roads. Even simple things like pedestrian passages that do not have any contact with the road (elevated passages or underground passages) are very hard to find in the US. I really would like to know one day what kind of design philosophy the traffic engineering field follows with so much compromises.
• globular-toast 1y ago
  I wish they wouldn't just focus on deaths. The difference between being killed and having your body wrecked is pretty small. I'm curious to know what the numbers look like if we considered some less extreme interpretation of taking someone's life.
• physicsguy 1y ago
  I was amazed when I travelled to the US at just how pedestrian hostile it is. I was travelling to a conference in San Diego and it was just impossible to walk safely between where I was staying and where I was going to because this was the road: https://maps.app.goo.gl/G2PeVbEzQyqbgDTN9 https://maps.app.goo.gl/G2PeVbEzQyqbgDTN9
  • throw-qqqqq 1y ago
    Hahah I got stopped by cops twice for walking to a food court in San José ten years ago :D They thought I was crazy for walking basically. After reassuring them I knew who and where I was, they let me walk off. Much of America seems very car-centric (to a European like myself).
    • rebolek 1y ago
      I was at a conference years ago in Burbank, wanted to walk during lunch break as I was tired from all the sitting and was stopped by the cops also. They were super friendly, offered me a ride but couldn't understand why I'm walking (especially without some destination). It's a really different mindset from Europe.
    • fipar 1y ago
      This is basically what seems to have prompted Bradbury to write The Pedestrian: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pedestrian There’s a great audio version (I think from the BBC) too.
  • quantumwannabe 1y ago
    Only because you chose to walk through the port instead of through town. Google Maps' walking route is shorter than the route that goes through that road, entirely on sidewalks, and only requires crossing one road wider than one car lane per direction (and said road has a signalized crosswalk). There is also a pedestrian bridge across that road that could be used instead, but Google didn't pick it, likely because it connects with "private" property (the convention center's path). https://maps.app.goo.gl/asfGrRLkLmtpqnps5 https://maps.app.goo.gl/asfGrRLkLmtpqnps5
• joduplessis 1y ago
  From the many years of running in a very poorly traffic-controlled country, you learn to look at cars and also to look if drivers notice you. It was actually uncomfortable watching people not look, but cars always stopping when I lived in Germany.
• petermcneeley 1y ago
  Does this count suicides? Does this count fault?
• emorning4 1y ago
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• CalRobert 1y ago
  What's even sadder is seeing how many pedestrians are killed _even as far fewer people_, especially kids, are actually walking. It's like watching drownings increase even as fewer people take up swimming. I walked to school in the 90's and even then the curtain-twitchers scolded my mom for letting me. It has only worsened since, as every destination is ages away and involves crossing multiple 45MPH stroads with monster trucks with 5 foot high hoods roaring down them.
  • notacoward 1y ago
    Maybe, at least some places, it's a vicious cycle. I don't like that phrase generally, but it seems to fit here. More people driving means more vehicle vs. pedestrian contention and accidents, which means fewer people walking, which means more people driving, 'round and 'round we go. I do see this playing out at a couple of schools near me. The number of people driving their middle-school kids less than half a mile is insane, and it's not just at the school either. Any street that has a convenient cut-through to the school grounds effectively becomes a second pick-up line at 2-4pm. Walking or running near there has become noticeably less safe since we moved to this neighborhood five years ago, from the increase in traffic alone even before other factors are accounted for.
  • mdip 1y ago
    I believe this has a lot to do with the problem in my area. We have a bunch of disconnected sidewalks almost everywhere. They've started connecting them. There's more pedestrian traffic at some lights at some times of the day but it's nowhere near consistent. Driving, especially during commute, becomes an exercise of muscle memory for most of us. We are used to what we see. All year long I might encounter a pedestrian at my most commonly encountered intersections once a year. Most drivers are on auto-pilot, they're used to looking for cars, if people aren't abundantly obvious, they're missed. They've started connecting sidewalks around me. Foot traffic has tripled as a result. Still, that means I encounter a pedestrian three times a year? That's not going to improve exposure enough to make anyone specifically look any more frequently. It's going to just create more opportunities for people to get hit. And that's what's happened.
    • 1y ago
• herval 1y ago
  ever-bigger cars, tiny sidewalks, wide roads that take a minute to cross, the legality of turning left/right on a red light, few bike paths, mostly merged with fast highway lanes? I don't know, feels like a recipe for roadkill
• dukoid 1y ago
  Why do so many drivers kill pedestrians? Passive voice and saying that they are killed by cars is part oft the problem: https://visionzeroreporting.com/ https://visionzeroreporting.com/
  • rufus_foreman 1y ago
    Did the passive voice suddenly start being used in 2009? Because otherwise, it does nothing to explain the increase in accidental deaths of pedestrians.
• throwaway984393 1y ago
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• rafaeltorres 1y ago
  Wonder if it may have something to do with longer commute times, which is not discussed in the article, i.e. a trip that used to take n minutes a few years ago may now take double due to congestion, leading to more impatient drivers. At least in my city (Miami) all people talk about is how untenable the commute times have become.
• kode95 1y ago
  The tendency to compare the US to Europe in the comments here baffles me: Not only are there major differences with regards to roads and road safety between the countries of Europe, but there are also major differences within Europe when it comes to driving style, aggression, risk-taking, etc. If I, as a Dane, go to e.g. southern France, I'll see a completely different style of driving than in Denmark. In the comments here you'll see people saying that European roads are much better suited for pedestrians. If you ask me that is definitely not the case in e.g. Spain.
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    > In the comments here you'll see people saying that European roads are much better suited for pedestrians. If you ask me that is definitely not the case in e.g. Spain. Having been in both Spain (a few regions) and the US, Spanish roads (at least what I saw of them) are immeasurably better for pedestrians than US ones. > The tendency to compare the US to Europe in the comments here baffles me Context is that the US is a huge outlier in road deaths. No European country comes close.
• thefz 1y ago
  Because cars there are fucking landships with a radiator so tall it will likely hit any vital organ between the neck and the pelvis.
  • apothegm 1y ago
    Or if you’re not tall, just slam straight into your head.
• anarticle 1y ago
  American drivers are terrible and rules are barely enforced. License is cheap/free/no training so that's what we get. With people on their phones, roads will have to become obstacle courses with speed bumps and undulating curve to force people to pay attention. Philadelphia's solution to speeding has been speed bumps. Sounds great until you realize there are no specs for this, and some of them are so high that nearly every 10th car going over now makes an extremely loud scraping sound. Now imagine living in front of that! I ride a motorcycle most times and I am always at very high attention when riding. I see people scrolling TikTok not only at lights, but flying through town. I see they didn't find a cause there, but it seems so prevalent and dangerous that it has to have caused an uptick in accidents as well as deaths. That data feels very fishy for it to be so different between regions (there is not a different culture in different areas for phone use). I also wonder if there are a few confounders, covid, number of cars on road, safety of cars, and local code rules on what constitutes a registered vehicle (this is more variable than you think). In some places, if it rolls, you can register it. NJ has mandatory 2y state inspection. At least we have Roosevelt Boulevard, the most dangerous roadway in the entire US! We're #1! (It is literally called: The Corridor of DEATH) https://whyy.org/articles/philly-roosevelt-blvd-rising-traffic-deaths/ https://whyy.org/articles/philly-roosevelt-blvd-rising-traff... I think it goes up to 12 lanes wide at some point WITH a pedestrian crossing.
• thecopy 1y ago
  At its core it comes from the infrastructure paying zero respect to non-drivers.
• kibwen 1y ago
  Something that seems to be absent here is a discussion of turn-right-on-red laws. In conjunction with the SUV hypothesis of increasingly deadly vehicles (in conjunction with the trend of modern cars having increasingly huge A-pillars which inhibit visibility), the existence of such laws could explain the US as an outlier, the urban/rural difference, and the anomaly of NYC, where right-on-red has been banned since 1977.
• sebstefan 1y ago
  >Relatedly, in the majority of pedestrian deaths, the pedestrian is blamed for the accident. In 66% of cases, pedestrians are described as “failing to yield right of way,” “jaywalking,” or “in roadway improperly.” In 87% of cases, the driver is not charged with anything following the accident It's insane that society has come to accept that some parts of the public space are deadly, and it's your fault if you're not cautious and get killed on them. Just to have more cars. Now kids can't go to school by themselves
• nerdjon 1y ago
  I have no doubt that most of the blame here is on drivers. Way too often I see cars running red lights, barely paying attention, turning the wrong way on a one way, etc etc. That being said, (and to be clear I say this as someone that does not own a car). I also have been seeing more and more people not paying attention and just walking while staring at their phone. No walk symbol or anything. I have frustratingly had to grab my partner multiple times doing exactly this and almost walking into a car that was following the rules. Seriously if your walking (especially in a car centric area) you don't need to be doom scrolling through Instagram or whatever other crap your looking at. Quickly changing music, sending a text, whatever is one thing but I don't understand needing to look at Instagram while walking. And not just so you don't get killed by cars, the number of times these people almost walk into other people is insane...
• melenaboija 1y ago
  I’m from Spain and have lived in the U.S. for 11 years. I 100 percent feel less punished here than in Spain while driving. Just yesterday while taking my daughter to school, I was looking at my phone, the light turned green, and the car behind me had to wait a few seconds, it was a police car. He clearly saw me, and absolutely nothing happened. The police back home in Catalonia would have roasted me for that. And I have seen wild things here in US besides tons of people using phones like brushing teeth or eating with a plate and a fork.
  • rsynnott 1y ago
    > or eating with a plate and a for ... Like, the _driver_?
    • melenaboija 1y ago
      Yes
• teytra 1y ago
  They don't have a Vision Zero? (Plan for 0 deaths). Norway has ~100 persons killed in traffic per year, but is not satisfied with that: https://www.tryggtrafikk.no/content/uploads/2024/03/Nasjonal-tiltaksplan-for-trafikksikkerhet-pa-vei-2022-2025-Engelsk-kortversjon.pdf https://www.tryggtrafikk.no/content/uploads/2024/03/Nasjonal...
  • ceejayoz 1y ago
    Helsinki, Finland just had a year without a pedestrian death, too. https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/helsinki-records-zero-road-deaths-over-past-year-2025-08-22_en https://urban-mobility-observatory.transport.ec.europa.eu/ne...
• class3shock 1y ago
  I don't understand how the bigger vehicle theory tracks when pedestrian deaths were dropping from 1990-2010, a period that saw vehicles in general get larger and the same trend towards buying SUVs instead of cars. https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/us-vehicle-sales-by-fuel-economy-cars-trucks-and-suvs/ https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/us-vehicle-sales-by-...
• CalRobert 1y ago
  We may get a macabre opportunity to test the idea that this is related to very large vehicles, since Europe has been importing these incredibly large trucks (which, incidentally, do not meet EU safety standards, but are imported under a loophole). There are over 20,000 Dodge Rams in Europe (sometimes it feels like they're all here in the Netherlands) - see https://www.transportenvironment.org/uploads/files/2024-07-04-Letter-on-IVA-from-civil-society-Final.pdf https://www.transportenvironment.org/uploads/files/2024-07-0... - and 20% more were imported in 2023 than 2022. Worryingly, Von Der Leyen, in addition to capitulating to Trump on tariffs, apparently agreed to allow more of these things to be imported. https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/eu-cave-in-on-vehicle-trade-rules-will-cost-european-lives-as-us-pick-up-trucks-flood-into-europe https://www.transportenvironment.org/articles/eu-cave-in-on-...
• helle253 1y ago
  a couple of weeks ago, i was walking my 3 year old daughter and her friend to the beach, pushing them along in a wagon. I was crossing the street (a busy thoroughfare) in a marked crosswalk, that did not have a yield/stop sign or streetlight. A middle aged man in an SUV floored it in front of me. As he drove by he shouted 'FUCK YOUUU', as if I was in the wrong for walking in the crosswalk. Anyways, there's no reason i'm sharing this anecdote.
• mesofile 1y ago
  Besides the many other factors mentioned by commenters here, I'll add one other: drivers in the US rarely face consequences for killing pedestrians or, for that matter, other drivers, even when it's the result of willfully negligent or reckless behavior. It's such a longstanding trend that it's become a meme: if you want to get away with murder, make sure to kill your victim with a car. "I didn't see them/I made mistake" works so well that authorities just don't bring charges, because juries are so willing to accept this excuse. Perhaps because so many of them can see themselves doing the same thing. See: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-u-s-so-good-at-killing-pedestrians/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/why-is-the-u-s-so-good-at-k...
• notacoward 1y ago
  One possibility might be a combination of the "mostly urban" and "big SUV" factors. To put it another way: where are people driving those larger vehicles. I don't have numbers, but it does seem like vehicles that were once common mostly in suburban/exurban/rural environments are now more common in cities as well. Poor visibility plus higher pedestrian density seems like a powerfully bad combination. Mostly, though, drivers have just gotten worse. Corner-cutting is one of my pet peeves, and a good example here. I used to see someone cutting a corner across opposing traffic - usually someone turning off an arterial vs. someone trying to come out of the side street - less than once a week. Now, even though I drive less, it seems to be everyone all the time. If they're not cutting the corner, they're swinging wide to the same effect. Ditto for running red lights. Where I used to see one person running it by half a second, I now see three running it by multiple seconds. Turning where there's a "no turn on red" same way. I've stood at a rotary and counted how many cars were not using it properly, endangering others. Yeah, I know, get a life, but the fact remains that drivers are worse. The only real question IMO is why drivers are worse. I have more theories, of course. Breakdown of the social contract, people under more time pressure, phones (though that was already examined), etc. But those kind of aren't essential to my point so I'll leave them aside for now.
• Gud 1y ago
  Dysfunctional public transport.
• sotix 1y ago
  > if its big SUVs, why are pedestrian deaths for sedans increasing too? The article is well researched but doesn't seem to account for the increase in weight and size of the sedans it mentions as a counter to the rise of SUVs being a leading factor. I'd be interested in the data on a small that remained the same size and/or got smaller in the window: the Mazda Miata. | Model | Year | Length (in) | Width (in) | Height (in) | Curb Weight (lbs) | |----------------------|-------|--------------|------------|-------------|-------------------| | Honda Civic | 2009 | ~177.3 | ~69.0 | ~56.5 | ~2,600 - 2,700 | | Honda Civic | 2023 | ~184.0 | ~70.8 | ~55.7 | 2,877 - 2,935 | | Honda Accord | 2009 | 194.1 | 72.7 | 58.1 | ~3,193 | | Honda Accord | 2023 | ~192.2 | ~73.3 | ~57.1 | 3,239 - 3,280 | | Toyota Corolla | 2009 | ~179.7 | ~70.1 | ~57.7 | ~2,358 - 2,623 | | Toyota Corolla | 2023 | ~182.3 | ~70.5 | ~56.5 | 2,955 - 3,150 | | Toyota Camry | 2009 | ~192.1 | ~72.4 | ~58.1 | ~3,193 | | Toyota Camry | 2023 | ~192.1 | ~72.4 | ~56.9 | 3,244 - 3,280 | | Nissan Altima | 2009 | ~191.1 | ~72.0 | ~57.0 | ~3,192 | | Nissan Altima | 2023 | ~192.9 | ~72.0 | ~56.9 | 3,244 - 3,053 | | Mazda MX-5 (NC) | 2009 | ~157.5 - 158.3| ~67.7 | ~48.8 - 49.4| ~2,450 - 2,542 | | Mazda MX-5 (ND) | 2023 | ~154.1 | ~68.1 | ~48.6 | ~2,183 |
• lastofthemojito 1y ago
  What's the vehicle window tint situation outside of the US? Window tint is a pet peeve of mine - as a long-time small car driver I'm used to being around taller vehicles that I can't necessarily see through or around. But the situation has gotten worse and worse. The law hasn't changed AFAIK - there's a longstanding regulation that cars are generally not allowed to have dark tint from the factory but trucks, SUVs and vans can have dark tint from the second row back. So you used to see older "standard" pickup trucks, the ones with a single row of seats, and there'd be no tint - you could see through the truck. Now the typical pickup has 2 rows, and dark tint in the back. A lot of cars have become SUVs as well - now your Subaru Outback or even Crosstrek are technically categorized as SUVs and come with dark rear tint in most configurations. As a result, when I sit at a traffic light, I can see much less of what is happening beyond the neighboring vehicles than in years past. Sure, everywhere with roads has some large, opaque vehicles like delivery vans, etc. But the percentage of my field of view that is blocked by neighboring vehicles certainly seems higher than ever.
  • 93po 1y ago
    ive had to resort to heavy tint myself literally just to not be blinded by headlights constantly. i know its not legal but ill take the ticket to not have my retinas seared every 10 seconds at night
• migp 1y ago
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• migp 1y ago
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• rudnevr 1y ago
  having moved to us after 30 yrs of European experiences I would walk a lot in small and big East Cost cities. In the first year I was barely hit at least 3 times - once on the right turn with no lights (the driver only checked the left), once on the right turn red light (lack of my information so it's allowed in US), and once just when somebody went out of underground parking while talking to their phone. After that I learned never cross a road without making the eye contact with the upcoming driver. Nevertheless, there had been a few episodes in the following years.
  • rkomorn 1y ago
    I'm back in Europe after more than two decades in the US and I can't say I feel much safer as a pedestrian here.
    • rudnevr 1y ago
      i'm back too and i definitely do
      • rkomorn 1y ago
        Maybe this all depends a lot on where one lived in the US and where one lived in Europe, then, rather than some binary US vs EU thing?
• abricot 1y ago
  One thing that isn’t mentioned in the article is that driver’s education in US is a fucking sad joke, and the driving tests even more so. Many mention rules about yielding, and having to stop when turning right on red: most of the drivers only know a fraction of the rules. They never learned most of them. I’m not sure about this, but my understanding is that some states don’t even require a license if you are older.