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Comment by flyingfences | Hacker News Reader

Cars aren't killing more pedestrians. Drivers are.

Drivers are distracted. They've got their phones out. The cars themselves have awful touchscreen controls that takes driver attention off the road. Rear windows are shrinking more and more each year.

The other answer, I think, is that people have been driving more and more during the years of note in this article. Since 2010, the economy has been improving (generally), so cars, gas, etc. have become more affordable to most people, so people in general are driving more. More miles on the road at the same rate of collisions per mile means more collisions.

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This article directly refutes this claim. The US has 50% more road deaths than the UK. Are US drivers that much more likely to be distracted by their phones?

The key issue is that our roads are designed to maximize vehicle speed, and this kills people.

Focusing on the responsibilities of drivers ignores the environment that they operate in, which is clearly the worst in the developed world.

Americans will demand big roads, big cars and long distances, all at taxpayer expense, and then try to blame some other group when these things kill people.

Shrink roads, shrink cars, reduce amounts driven, or continue killing ~6000 Americans per year for your personal convenience

>The US has 50% more road deaths than the UK. Are US drivers that much more likely to be distracted by their phones?

It sounds like you're being rhetorical, but that sounds totally reasonable to me. It seems believable that one country might have some variables that cause drivers to be more distracted by phones, and when the safety margins of attention are so small, even a small difference in average distractedness could equate to 50% more deaths.

It's road design, speed limits and enforcement (or lack thereof on the US).

> The US has 50% more road deaths than the UK

Wonder if the process of learning to drive in those countries has an effect. I recall hearing that the US system is pretty lax when it comes to what's required to get a license, and that a fair few places basically have you drive around a parking lot/a few blocks rather than any sort of formal test.

On the other hand, while it's not super challenging, the UK one at least has a decent amount of work you need to put in to get a license, with a system involving two tests and examiners actually willing to fail people (even for things that wouldn't really be all that dangerous in practice).

One of the central points of the article is citing experts who refute this, and provide evidence to back that up.

Its a good article, Id recommend reading it.

To be fair, those experts are pushing a particular agenda. They are advocating for making roads and cars foolproof, which is a fine idea, but doesn't disprove the claim that in the absence of such foolproofing, phone distraction increases dangers.

The article makes a specious argument on behalf of those experts, and the statistics that were so heavy at top of article, disappear when these experts show up:

> Plus, within the US, pedestrian death occurs disproportionately in neighbourhoods populated by people with low-incomes and people of colour. Is distraction really more endemic in those neighbourhoods, or among people driving through them, than it is in wealthier, whiter areas? Or is it more likely that these neighbourhoods are more likely to be criss-crossed by high-speed roads, and less likely to receive investment in transit interventions that protect pedestrians?

It's silly to claim that poor neighborhoods have gotten 41% more high-speed roads in the past 10 years.

Remember that "expert testimony" is what one uses when one doesn't have evidence to show.

It's also silly to think that that difference is consistent with distracted driving causing the accidents. Are people more likely to be using their phone in these neighborhoods?

More likely it's that pedestrian traffic is much higher in poorer neighborhoods so the combined effect of distraction, environmental factors, car specs, and other things is much higher.

Real statistics are not being compiled. When was the last time you heard about a drunk pedestrian being hit by a sober driver? The narratives are being driven by bias, which leads to the wrong solutions in these cases, this is why the solutions aren't fixing problems.

For the past 5 years, Washington DC has been telling pedestrians that cars have to stop for them any time they are in a crosswalk, including on green lights to cross traffic. It's simply stupid and irresponsible for this to be a rule. I've seen pedestrians walk out into roads not looking and also distracted by devices...

Cities are more interested in speed cameras and tools that generate revenues rather than smart stop lights and warning systems for traffic. We're still using street lights from the medevil era that are pretty basic with no plans of updates.

Car drivers and pedestrians are one in the same. Overall awareness, education, and responsibility needs to be the focus, or the stats will keep going bad.

Do you have any data showing that pedestrian right of way at designated crossings raises collision rates? You sot of sound like someone who is just upset they have to yield to a pedestrian.

Yep I'd guess it was the phones and touchscreen controls. I remember in 2007 working on an autonomous car for the urban grand challenge. My team was talking about distracted driving because the iPhone had recently launched and someone said, 'I really hope this autonomous driving tech is not more than 10 years away because by then these touch screen phones will be fully saturated and drivers will be 10x worse' or something of that nature. Pretty prescient observation.

Your other observation is equally plausible but I'd have to look at the data.

Two relevant quotes from the article:

> And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit

> “All this talk about pedestrian distraction, driver distraction? It’s such a distraction,” says Ben Welle of the World Resource Institute for Sustainable Cities. “It puts all the responsibility on individuals, and none on the environment they operate in.”

> It puts all the responsibility on individuals

I think that's fair. If you're operating a vehicle, you'd darn well better be responsible for where it's going.

It might be fair, but it doesn't work. Environmental changes are better than legislation at changing driver behavior.

More and more it seems that there isn't really a "safe" way to operate a car. It's really about how much risk society is willing to accept.

Aggressively holding drivers accountable for their mistakes might be necessary and an improvement but it wouldn't be sufficient to make streets safe for other users.

The article covers this analsis more thoroughly.

> At the level of those involved, there is the question of who is distracted, reckless, drunk. Zooming out, there are factors such as the design and condition of the road, the quality (or absence) of a marked pedestrian crossing, the speed limit, the local lighting, the weight and height of the car involved.

> Last year, 41% more US pedestrians were killed than in 2008.

Driving is not up 41% in 10 years.

You beat me to posting about phones. There is a pretty strong correlation between the rapid increase in phone subscriptions and the increase in pedestrian deaths that started around 2009. I think phones in 2019 are also vastly more distracting than they were 10 years ago, and much of that is by design.

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