One thing mentioned in the article that rings very true is that vehicles are getting bigger. It’s not unusual to see trucks where the front grill is too high to see a child, or even some adults. We have the statistics to know that these vehicles are disproportionately likely to kill pedestrians, but vehicles sell based on the safety of people inside the vehicle, not people outside of it.

It’s a vicious circle, too. If everyone else has an SUV, you also want an SUV so you’re not crushed by one in a crash.

My personal opinion is blaming a spike on a things that have not changed recently (car sizes, pedestrian friendliness of cities, human nature) is not logical:

The most likely candidates (again, in my opinion) are:

changes to driver psychology somehow due to the pandemic (empty roads, then full roads again, greater anxiety or stress related to traveling back and forth to work, or something like that)

changes in enforcement of driving laws (the protests of 2020 caused changes in police budget allocations or how police enforce minor laws like traffic laws OR staffing issues due to the pandemic with law enforcement agencies, or both)

A near universal change in how drivers are certified / licensed (could be due to changes in the pandemic or some other factor?)

OR this is a statistical fluke someone hooked onto and we are all drawing far-reaching conclusions from.

Narcissism is at an all-time high.

One change could be people are spending more time outdoors walking. I am not sure how to back that up with data, but anecdotally it seems to be true.

Cars are bigger and faster but with the same fundamental reliance on humans not to speed or be dicks as when Model T was on the road.

Fwiw, many groups are attempting to build self-driving cars it would be easy to produce cars that drove at sensible speeds as an intermediate step. That this hasn't happened says something about how a society values drivers', and drivers rights to break the law versus those of the innocents they routinely kill or maim as result.

Transport cost are too high forcing people to use alternatives like walking.