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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

No, there is clear correlation between increased Smart Phone Adoption and the increase in Pedestrian Fatalities.

many people want to blame the increase in SUV or worse F150's because they have a flat front, this is moronic on a number of levels and seems to mainly trace back to climate change activism hate for all large vehicles.

Reality is the focus continues to be to Drunk driving, when we should put the enforcement effort back on reckless driving the cause of which is irrelevant.

if a pedestrian is hit be a driver because they were busy texting or playing candy crush they are no less dead than if they were hit by a Drunk, but under the law these 2 events will be treated very very differently

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It is a certainty that larger vehicles are more likely to cause pedestrian injury and fatality, all else equal. This has approximately nothing to do with "climate change activism" - for example, nothing changes in terms of pedestrian safety if the huge SUV or truck in question is hybrid or electric, except perhaps becoming even more dangerous because it's quieter.

Above all else, speed* and bad road design kill pedestrians. Speeding is ubiquitous in North America, and roads/streets are absolutely terribly designed, with an almost singular focus to facilitate speeding and reduce cognitive load on drivers.

* - though if we exchange 'momentum' for 'speed' we can tie it back to the size/weight issue.

>because it's quieter

Electric cars aren't quiet at speed. Other than that I agree.

"At Speed" what kind of speed are we talking, but "At Speed" chances are the type of vehicle make very little difference.

At best the augment can be made for very very very low speed accidents.

I dont know about you, but I think a better use of time would be going into preventing pedestrian vehicle contact, then trying to ruin the vehicles people love.... (and make no mistake, adopting the changes people want to these vehicles will ruin them)

It's hard to reduce pedestrian-vehicle contact, in my opinion, when you have vehicles where the drivers are just so much more powerful than the pedestrian. Part of the reason people even buy those is to sit up higher, and be bigger than the others, and there's no way to reconcile that with pedestrian safety imo. Especially when speeding and reckless driving is so damn common in America. People feel untouchable in them, and that means there's an increase in the contact rates regardless of whether pedestrians have right-away or not.

>Especially when speeding and reckless driving is so damn common in America.

People aren't to to take these seriously until there's a more than laughable correlation between violating the law and behaving at or beyond the limits of what people consider reasonable. As it stands now pretty much everyone who's commute involves a limited access freeway outside of heavy traffic hours violates the letter of the law for one or both of these.

The SUV/truck reason was first discovered by the government, but received little attention. There was talks of baking in pedestrian survivability into crash tests (like EU and Japan do) but the car lobby pushed back hard on this and to date no regulations have been created. Nice straw man though

And yet, AFAIK, research largely dismisses a causal link between 'distracted walking' and pedestrian injuries.

e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822...

I dont believe anywhere did I talk about distracted walking. I was talking about distracted DRIVING

> when we should put the enforcement effort back on reckless driving the cause of which is irrelevant.

There's no political will for this because it would require some discussion about what truly constitutes reckless driving and what reasonable highways speeds are and the people supplying the political will for any road safety reforms know that those discussions would not go their way.

Why would it need to involve talking about Highway speeds? Pedestrians are prohibited on Highways..

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