The report itself shows there's an increase in pedestrian fatalities in slightly fewer than half of states and the increase comes from deaths at night and not in the daytime. How would an increase in SUVs (which is a national trend) cause this result?
I say this is off because an increase in proportion of SUV involvement is primarily an indictator of popularity of SUVs, rather than anything about SUVs being more deadly.
I happen to believe, fairly uncontroversially, I think, that SUVs are far more deadly than a regular car, hitting adults in the chest instead of the legs, and children in the head instead of the chest, but I also think poor journalism is pretty dangerous, and worth investigating.
Do you agree that a SUV has worse ability to observe the road? Do you agree that a pedestrian has more chances to survive after being hit by a small car?
If you answer "yes" to both my question than you have to understand that the real question is "why an increase in SUVs is not causing this result in other states". If your answer is "no" then you are talking not about "this result" but about a something else.
Regardless, the fact is that the increase in pedestrian deaths is mostly in a few states and mostly in nighttime driving and SUVs don't explain either of those factors.
It's going to depend a lot on local pedestrian habits and on the available infrastructures: as a thought experiment say in State A people are never walking in the street, while in State B they are walking a lot, then the national increase in SUV will have no impact on pedestrian death in State A but will have on State B.
If there were evidence found that is linked to nighttime, e.g. because more people are crossing roads at night than before, or wearing less night-visible clothing than before, then that would be the place to start.
- Worse outcomes when pedestrians are struck. A lower car might “merely” break legs, while an SUV with a higher belt line might strike a head or vital organ and be more lethal. SUVs tend to weigh more as well, which only hurts pedestrians.
- Worse visibility due to higher higher ground clearance, longer hoods, and of course modern rollover protection. I wouldn’t be shocked if you could do a study on pedestrian visibility using a passenger car from 2000, and an SUV from 2023, and found that the SUV had significantly worse visibility of pedestrians.
Wait, so more cars is actually the answer. Fewer cars == more deaths.
> The pandemic has waned, but cases of reckless driving — and subsequently the number of Americans killed while walking — has not.
Ah crap, maybe everyone has long COVID then?
Sometimes the easiest solutions hide in plain sight.
There's no excuse for it. And this superficial, useless article doesn't discuss it at all. Instead, it regurgitates pablum about the same regressive do-nothing "solution" known as "traffic calming." That's just ruining our streets instead of attacking the real problem.
On almost every drive I see people speeding >15 mph over the limit, recklessly weaving in and out of traffic and making dangerous passes to get slightly ahead. The police are doing nothing against this dangerous and illegal behavior and won’t do anything about texting either regardless of the offense level.
Traffic calming measures would be by some entity the cops can’t control, so they hate them too.
Current american roads are a vicious environment, encouraging speeding, jostling for position, zoning out.
Traffic calming is the exact opposite of ruining streets.
And even more calming is the delay it introduces to emergency responses. Because when your dad's having a heart attack, I want the the paramedics to drive languidly up a lane and over picturesque mounds of asphalt and around "bump-outs" and wait for an immobilized column of traffic that can't pull out of the way because a lane has been deleted and replaced by a concrete berm or a field of plastic bollards.
Ah, a paradise of virtue!
Whoops.
And making everything punishable as much as possible does not work all that much either. It just make people feel good that someone was punished.
Making streets endlessly more impassable results in driving "the good way," whatever that is?
No. I am happy to drive within the speed limit in most cases (the exceptions being glaring rip-offs with no possible safety excuse, such as 40 MPH on Lake Shore Drive in Chicago). All I ask is that we the taxpayers are afforded properly-timed lights and anything else we can do to make traffic as efficient as we can.
But texting? If you actually look at the drivers around you on a given day on a single errand, you can't NOT see it happening. And it's so easy to spot from a block away: the random braking, veering, creeping along, not moving their ass when the light changes... at the very least these people are stealing from everyone else on the road by blocking traffic.
Here in Germany, my son has to sit through 14 theory lessons and then pass a theoretical test (with questions out of a pool of 1400 questions). Then he needs 12 mandatory driving lessons (night, highway, country road) and probably 8 more lessons to get him to the rquired level to pass the driving test. This will set me back approx 3000€ ($3000).
IMO the requirements for a drivers license in Germany are a bit too strikt, but what I heard from my brother, who got his drivers license in Minnesota during a high school exchange year, the requirements in the US are really, really low. Maybe we can agree on an international standard somewhere in the middle?
Over here, across your eastern border, there's been a huge increase in the number of people on the road and it's becoming increasingly obvious that some people are better off taking the bus/train.
Problem is, trains/buses are disappearing, so especially elderly people are either stuck at home or have to get behind the wheel, to mixed results.
Both the theory test and the road test were far easier in California. There were no challenging road situations, and this was in a 'city'. I'm sure in rural areas it's even easier.
Regarding required lessons, in California this differs by age. If you're under a certain age, you need to complete a certain number of lessons before you can take a test. If you're older, you don't.
Dunno how it works for real, but can't be much different =)
- at ~16, you become eligible for a driving permit which allows for supervised driving only
- getting the permit requires you to "pass" a pathetic 10ish question exam for which the literal questions and (multiple choice) answers are publicly available
- after 6-12 months (again, variable) you become eligible to get your full license
- to get a license, you usually need a guardian or affiliated adult to sign a form saying they taught you for over 40 hours of supervised driving.
- sometimes you also need a "safety class" or possible a "driver's education" class. Driver's education can be useful, since it's literally just a teacher riding around in a car driven by students and pointing out where the students go wrong. Safety classes are almost invariably useless, since they mostly just regurgitate rules of the road and obvious safety tips that most students immediately forget.
- Once you become eligible for a license, you go to a Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV), the same place where you got your permit. Schedule an appointment, and an employee will take you for a driving test. In the driving test, you have to show your mettle at serious challenges like parallel parking a car, stopping at stop signs, looking over your shoulder while changing lanes, and looking both ways before making a turn at a stop. This basic test has a less than 50% passing rate, but you can take it as many times as you like so even the worst drivers eventually jump through the hoop.
So basically the process you imagined but with more time and hoops where the government gets to charge you $$.
Seems like an infrastructure problem then as well.
should have stopped there, then. for every inattentive ped there's a dozen inattentive drivers
There was a big push in my city to stop “over policing” things like jaywalking and disorderly conduct. We stopped ticketing people for this and over a few years people have started jaywalking and even just chilling and having conversations in a lane.
In the US, however, streets are understood to be owned by cars. Drivers move much faster and without regard for bikes/pedestrians/etc. Even the fact that a pedestrian in the street is called "jaywalking" is an expression of this difference--it's culturally frowned upon, if not actually illegal, for pedestrians to be in the street.
So the challenge is: how do you change a culture? There's a better way demonstrated in many other places, but people get very grouchy when you ask them to start acting differently--"It's our way of life!"
Another factor is that EVERYONE drives in the us. It doesn't matter if you like it, or are comfortable with it, or even if you're good at it. You HAVE to drive. Over here maybe only 50% of driving age people even have licenses. People who don't like driving don't have to since we have great public transportation.
The most sloppy driving I've ever seen is in the us. People weaving in and out of their lane staring at a phone, people driving into ditches, driving through building walls in parking lots you name it. The reality is that many people just should not be driving a car but are forced to by abysmal american infrastructure and even worse city planning.
Likely in some case they were driving under the influence vs being on the phone.
Cars are pretty sad topic
It is sad how many good safety and driving easiness features modern cars have, yet majority of people do not have access to them due to price
It is also crazy how unreliable cars actually are. 20 years old car means some surprise every 3rd or 4th drive
Not so sure about that, petrol engines and cars matured a lot in the last decades. I'm driving a 2004 Ford Focus and it is still going strong, with no "surprises", which, granted, I remember having every drive in 1996 with a 1981 Renault 14.
I would considering changing this old car for environmental impact, in-car entertainment or driving safety measures, but not for the reliability of it.
Interestingly narrowing roads also helps cars slow down naturally. Build some separate bike lanes while you're at it.
What an interesting definition of "help". By the same token, you can help pedestrians to slow down by breaking their legs.
Am I living in groundhog day?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/06/pedestrian-deaths-rose-...
Check the graph on how there was a big increase in particular states.
Source report can be downloaded at :
https://www.ghsa.org/resources/Pedestrians23
Check page 21 for the report on day vs night deaths.
Does anyone have good data on other countries? I've looked at Australia and there is no great pedestrian death increase. So it's unlikely to be mobile phones driving the increase.
Go here for the Australian dashboard.
https://www.bitre.gov.au/publications/ongoing/road_deaths_au...
The trend is useful for the country as a whole, but the numbers for the individual states are small enough for the per-year variations to represent noise or one-offs (like a major events with drinking, or a nasty accident).
Did you mean that you only drive and don't walk, or do you just always stay home?
Anyway, some cities are doing better with bike lanes. Making them areas on the sidewalk (which needs to be pretty big obviously), or organizing a road as (traffic | parking | bike lane) rather than (traffic | bike lane | parking). Pretty slow going though, and only denser cities.
Sadly, pedestrians are ALSO VERY inattentive. My closest encounter to a pedestrian accident was when a pedestrian stepped in front of my car, mid-bloc, on a very dark night, wearing all black, and staring at his phone.
The first thing I saw in the dark was his face, lit by the glow of his phone...
- Increased driver distraction due to smartphones and in-car touch screens.
- Decreased driver visibility due to improved rollover protection. (Ironically, this may largely be the blame of SUVs as well, since passenger cars are much harder to roll over)
I can’t go through a single day without seeing some driver looking down at their phone. I honestly wager I could drive better drunk than some drivers can manage when distracted by their phones.
In the US the only way to legally kill on multiple occasions is by vehicle accident. Yet the system is afraid of taking away ones 'right' to drive as it degrades quality of life so much. You can report someone you know is unsafe, though in some states they'll be notified who reported them, causing a chilling effect.
The intro video details a short walk in Houston, which is pretty alarming: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxykI30fS54
In my town there is one street that in winter with a wet salty road is like a mirror. The sun at a certain time during a certain time of year plus the "salt mirror" makes it practically impossible to see.
