Why are pedestrian deaths increasing in the US?
cityobservatory.org
cityobservatory.org
At the end of the day, the failure is with how our vehicles in America are tested and rated. Safety ratings for vehicles are only in "their class", meaning for instance that they don't smash a sedan into an SUV; they only smash sedans into other sedans, and SUVs into other SUVs. This presents a major asymmetry, leading buyers to think SUVs are safer, when that safety comes at the expense of other users of the road, including people on foot and bike.
A major step toward reducing fatality rates in a vehicle-person collision is to factor in pedestrian safety when evaluating vehicle safety rates.
Im not sure what planet you live on. They absolutely will. Cattle and deer are dumb. As a cyclist, I doubt you ever leave the city and actually think a significant amount of people buy them for looks.
Anyway, I grew up in a rural area (outside of Texas) where grille guards could be useful. Didn't see many grille guards back there. I even (briefly) worked at a farm before, literally shoveling manure.
I've lived here long enough to observe that grille guards are far more prevalent here than they are in other places, even other places where grille guards seem appropriate.
Also, as a fellow Texan, you're dead wrong. The majority of the people who have those have them because they have ranches and do need them.
Given that I live in central Austin, I find it hard to believe that most drivers I encounter with grille guards need them because they have a ranch. That would imply that many more people have ranches than I believe is true. Plus, I grew up in a rural area outside of Texas and rarely saw grille guards, even on farms.
https://www.amazon.com/High-Mighty-SUVs-Dangerous-Vehicles/d...
Also worth mentioning is the effect of these walls of steel on visibility, both for other drivers and for non-drivers. Lower visibility means shorter reaction windows means more collisions.
Oh, I don't think that's misunderstood at all. Safety is generally measured with respect to the occupants of the vehicle only, everyone else be damned.
Heck, there used to be a myth that in an impending head-on collision you would speed up because that would put most of the force onto the other car and reduce your own damage. (That's not really how that works, of course)
That's the advice for when you're gonna hit a large animal. Getting off the brake raises the nose lessening the chance the animal will wind up sharing the passenger cabin with you. It's not totally invalid but pretty dated. With the low hoods of modern cars Bambi is gonna wind up in the passenger seat damn near every time. If you're driving some 50s-70s brick then it holds more water.
https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15118822/taking-the-h...
We walk less, but we die more.
I think it's because of these factors, not despite them. We die more because pedestrian traffic has dropped so low that drivers no longer look for foot traffic.
I have lived without a car more than a decade. Driver's frequently are shocked to notice me. I do all I can to catch their eye and make sure they see me. Otherwise, they just make their turn/ go through the crosswalk like I don't exist.
Then I bought a motorcycle. Took the CHP approved two-day driving class. It made me a better driver. But I was still in a rush.
Now I live outside of NYC. No car. No motorcycle. I walk or take taxis. In the burbs, people drive just as you describe. No awareness of pedestrians. Most people don’t obey right of way. And 9 out of ten drivers drive in excess of the speed limit—even in residential.
It’s interesting to note. On the South Shore of Long Island there are more pedestrian deaths than where I live in the North Shore. The roads are much wider and laid out more on the grid on the South Shore. I guess it gives the careless driver the illusion of safer conditions for their recklessness.
A minute, and half a block down, I saw him honking at a pedestrian, who was crossing an intersection on the walk sign.
There's an amazing bit of cognitive dissonance that happens when your run-of-the-mill moron climbs behind the wheel of a vehicle.
Other factors... there is no right turn on red, most cars are manual transmission, drivers have to be more alert in order to not hit oncoming traffic, etc.
But I also grew up in America and walking was far more common here when I was growing up. When an activity starts to go extinct, myriad forms of seemingly invisible support for it also stop happening, including changes in mental models and assumptions for people whose thought processes impact outcomes.
Europe has always been more pedestrian friendly, in part because a lot of it was built before cars existed. There are countless towns where you cannot drive in some sections because it was built hundreds of years ago. You park and walk in.
The US has much less of that. You see it on some major college campuses. You mostly don't see it as some historic part of town built before the car even existed.
The existence of intractable, highly valued old parts of town like that will inevitably influence life experience, mental models and ongoing design policies, among other things. We just don't have that same psychological anchor for our landscapes and policies.
When I drove a car I used to sympathize with both cyclists and pedestrians. Now that I've been commuting and frequently running errands by bicycle for a couple of years my sympathy has waned significantly due the behavior I observe in my fellow cyclists and pedestrians.
[..] at the same time pedestrian deaths have been soaring the US, they’ve been dropping steadily in Europe."
Another uniquely American thing I've witnessed is people not even bothering to look when crossing the street because of whatever video they're watching on their phone.
I even heard of one study that concluded that the music actually increased awareness and focus.
https://smartech.gatech.edu/bitstream/handle/1853/59823/MAY-...
"Not clear" indeed. It just doesn't get much clearer.
I don't know if this is becoming more common, but it's been on my mind more in recent years and I think it has influenced me a little bit as a pedestrian to step in front of cars like I don't care when I do have the right of way. Whether or not I am entitled to, I imagine it increases my risk.
So I think people should definitely consider that pedestrians are changing and not just drivers.
Do you also contend that people with hearing impairment should not be walking?
To analogize, I believe you ought to avoid unnecessary medical treatments, because each presents some kind of risk. If, however, you need treatment, I suggest you receive it (though it will carry a risk). By the same token, if you can walk carefully and observe the world around you, you ought to. If you need to walk and cannot see, it's fine to just accept that certain things carry risk.
Hearing is arguably more useful in many situations, as it is omnidirectional. I can hear a car coming from behind me; I likely cannot see it.
If you think pedestrians "jaywalking" is the problem, you are the problem.
It's now 2019. We're smarter. We know how to engineer streets to not embarrass ourselves further with meaningless "appeals to everyone to watch out".
Can you provide a example of these 'engineered streets' that you are talking about? I truly don't what you mean here.
Anecdotally, cars in Europe on average also seem smaller than those in the US, and maybe a similar correlation for vehicle-pedestrian accidents exists but simply don't result as often in fatalities.
That alone probably doesn't mean much because that was still the trend 10 years ago. But the use of smartphones may have increased. Long story short, does a manual transmission reduce distracted driving because it's harder to use your free hand for other activities?
[1] https://www.thezebra.com/insurance-news/2805/manual-vs-autom...
I don't think this is particularly relevant to pedestrian deaths though. You can still find ways to distract yourself in a manual.
True, but it's harder to text and drive when you really do need both hands (and both feet) to drive successfully.
Anecdotally, I find driving a manual transmission keeps me much more in tune with all of the variables involved in driving (inside and outside the car) than driving an automatic does.
1: Removing one way streets. Having to drive all the way around to go somewhere nearby keeps the car on the road that much longer and doubles the number of crosswalks to pass through. 2: Removing left turns. Cars invading the pedestrians' right of way from the other side of the street is dangerous. 3: Reducing city speed limits from 30mph to 15. 30mph is ridiculous. 4. Enforcing carpooling. One person driving a huge SUV is such a waste of gas, space, and contributes to highways doubling as parking lots at rush hour. 5. Promoting city housing as much as possible for all new growth. For every honest baby-boomer suburb created with proper planning, there were two white-flight suburbs hastily created without. 6. Demanding companies in the city limits revise the need for employees to commute. Employees who can do their job at home deserve that privilege.
What really, really concerns me, in the last few years, are tints on driver side windows. My rule is, I never walk in front of a car unless I made eye contact with the driver. I will even, if I approach from the passenger side, knock on the hood if they are looking left. With the new tints, there are many cars in my city where I cannot see the driver. At all. This confuses me, since I thought opaque tints were illegal.
I think you can't tint front side windows in EU.
Another change in concert that might help is much higher gasoline taxes. Gasoline can cost upwards of $8 per gallon in many parts of Europe. When fuel is that expensive, you really don't want to get a vehicle any larger than necessary. By contrast, fuel here in the US is way too cheap, and way too many people get large vehicles who have no real need for them, and aren't charged nearly enough extra for the privilege.
When it comes to safety manufacturers are optimizing for tests. Change the tests and you'll change what they optimize for.
In what way are large vehicles less regulated? Legitimate question.
Without that regulation, station wagons would still be viable in the US market, and Ford wouldn't have discontinued nearly all cars.
But yes, of course it's important to have the right regulations. CAFE regulations are pretty shitty as far as that goes. A much more sensible regulation would be to add a sales tax and annual registration tax inversely proportional to the fuel mileage of the vehicle, which plenty of European countries have done: https://www.eea.europa.eu/themes/transport/vehicles-taxation...
But the fact that some shitty regulations were passed with huge loopholes because of lobbyist efforts doesn't mean that better regulations can't (and don't) work.
But lower-income people are also less likely to own a car. Even among those who do, they're more likely to moderate their gas usage, more likely to find ways to carpool, and more likely to find the fuel savings of a smaller car to be compelling.
Consider a working stiff driving a 10 year old car. Living in a place with no good public transportation. Raising the gas tax assumes he has/had options he doesn't not in fact have. And policy changes that would give him an alternative have time lines a 100 times longer than next months rent.
Opinion: Gas taxes are based on wishful ideologically driven thinking that free markets can solve public policy failures.
Of course this working stiff can't afford to buy a new Tesla, but in my experience poor people turn over their cars faster than the middle class. Their junker breaks down and it'll cost more to fix it than it's worth so they sell the old one to a wrecker and buy another 10 year old car. Maybe the next 10 year old car is a used Leaf? Awful range, but it gets him to work and back, and it saves a good bit of money...
Nobody gets cheques in the mail for it. When BC introduced its RNCT, the BC Liberals[1] sent exactly one set of cheques out, once - while burying the revenue-neutral revenues in an abstract, unmeasurable corporate and income tax cut. Rob the poor to pay the rich sort of stuff.
On the bright side, it also reduced gas usage by ~20% in 10 years[2], compared to the rest of the country, which is about ~20% more of a reduction then all the useless self-congratulatory hand-wringing about the plight of the poor has ever accomplished. [3]
[1] For foreign readers - the BC Liberals are liberal-in-name only. They are the mainstream conservative party of British Columbia, and have close ties to the Federal Conservative Party of Canada.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Columbia_carbon_tax
[3] If we're going to put the brakes on any climate-disaster-related initiative, because someone, somewhere is going to be worse off for it, you may as well shoot me now. Someone, somewhere is always going to be worse off with every policy decision. We'll all be worse off if we keep wasting time, instead of acting.
There's a couple of confounding factors at work, here, the most important one of which is the smoke from the tyre pyre of the Federal Liberal administration.
the more relevant criticism, in my view, is that a gas tax would be too indirect and wouldn't induce larger vehicles to become safer (not to mention it's confusing, thus making people mad).
so then, could we construct an incentive that was proportional to a vehicle's safety record (along with a progressive punishment for the inverse)? as another commenter added, insurance may be the right avenue for this.
This political campaign in the Netherlands transformed society in the 1970s. It is a model for political reform in the US
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
Unfortunately he happened to somehow be walking at a constant bearing with decreasing range to my line of sight, hiding right behind my A pillar. Luckily, because I was decelerating to turn at the last minute I didn’t strike him hard enough to do much harm, but he was visibly shaken.
You see a typical car from the 80s now, and the A and B pillars seem to have nothing to them, rather than the great chunky things current cars have.
If I had a right of way while driving but I was on my phone and someone hits me or I hit them I can be at fault for not paying attention.
Being a pedestrian doesn’t mean you’re absolved of all responsibilities, anyone actively interacting with traffic needs to put the phone down and pay attention.
You shouldn't. You're doing the bare minimum to operate a modern vehicle safely.
Your wording seems to blame a slower vehicle being passed for not being passed before the passing vehicle crossed the slower vehicle's lane.
Bikers are told to share the road with vehicles even in places where it makes absolutely no sense and drivers are going at 2x-3x speed of the bike and there are no bike lane demarcations whatsoever.
Newsflash for you (if any politicians are reading this) - painting a small icon of a bike on the side of the road without any physical separation IS NOT a sufficient safety feature for a "bike lane".
When I'm riding, they always remind me more of chalk outlines around the dead than an actual safety feature.
>these crosswalks give people a false sense of security that they can cross without vigilance at any time
I'm Australian so I'm not sure if a crosswalk is exactly the same, but the whole point of what we call a "pedestrian crossing" is that a pedestrian can cross at any time with as much or as little vigilance as they want.
It is illegal to not give way and it is illegal to drive across the pedestrian crossing if there is a pedestrian already on it.
I very much doubt you'll be able to locate a study showing that jaywalking is safer than crossing at a pedestrian crossing.
That's a fair position to take, but I would be questioning why it is that the drivers are unaware or unwilling to obey those laws?
Yes, if the walking-person symbol is on the thing, I expect to be able to walk without dodging these megaton deathtraps who want to be one minute earlier to the job they hate. I especially despise that cars are even allowed to turn into a street while pedestrians are crossing. What's the point of the walking-person symbol light if you're gonna allow cars to go through anyway during it? Dumb.
Hopefully assistive technologies help curb some of these trends as they filter down to base models and older vehicles get replaced with newer one which have these features.
As for the current cause, although they contrast with Europe and play it down, I have to think it’s primarily caused by driver distraction (and pedestrian as well but on the defensive side) rather than either rise of SUVs and or “entitlement” as well as perhaps a rise in “pedestrians” (people walking of running of jogging, etc.)
It's definitely about being used to it. In Munich there were pedestrians and bikers everywhere so you quickly learn to always watch. In California now I see a bike maybe once a week so I often don't look anymore.
One of reason why they got so heavy in the first place... was the higher requirement for crashworthiness.
People who come with those crashworthiness requirements need to put at least some effort thinking them through.
If there was a reason why surely it wouldn't be an issue because we would already know how to fix it.
Holy crap. There's a 'death rat'? And it is growing that fast?