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...

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

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!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

At its core it comes from the infrastructure paying zero respect to non-drivers.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

> 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?

They are killed by drivers.

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...

(corrected, thanks!)

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

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.

Does this count suicides? Does this count fault?

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.

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)

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).

Pedestrians are quite squishy.

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

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.

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 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-traff... I think it goes up to 12 lanes wide at some point WITH a pedestrian crossing.

Because cars there are fucking landships with a radiator so tall it will likely hit any vital organ between the neck and the pelvis.

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?

Culture.

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.

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

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Pedestrians on phones, not drivers on phones.

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.