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Comment by ejb999 | Hacker News Reader

>>The high rate of pedestrian deaths is a result of policy regarding road design, pedestrian infrastructure and lenient criminal charges. The driving culture is also to blame. Driving is a god given right. Cars equal freedom, and the bigger the better. Pedestrians are a nuisance and cyclists are the enemy.

Yea, but almost none of those things have changed in the last two year - so does nothing to explain the spike in the last two years.

What has changed in the last two years? Police being told not to police, not to pull people over for minor infractions, police departments being defunded or having their budget's cut - or being threatened with being defunded or having their budgets cut. Can't have to both way folks - like it not, the threat of being ticketed, towed or arrested has an effect on many peoples driving habits.

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More like blue flu than any real policy changes. The society at large threatening to hold the police accountable for their actions seems to have made them decide not to do their jobs even less than they were before.

Attempts to make the police more accountable are the cause of pedestrian deaths?

Do you have any data showing this causal link at all? Maybe broken down by place so we can see links like the pedestrian death increases match the places that did those things. Since you actually list several causal things, it can be broken down by places that limited enforcement for covid reasons vs those that defunded vs those that didn't do those things? Bonus points if you bother to break out the overly broad "defunded" category into actual policy change groupings, there were a lot of reforms that got lumped into that term, many of them having nothing to do with money to enforce laws.

Why not do your own homework and prove me wrong.

Ahh, so you made it up. Neat!

You’re parroting unfounded conservative talking points. We never defunded the police. Any cuts were minor and temporary

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/cities-vowed-2020-cut-po...

The parent is not just talking about budget cuts. There were policy updates to not pursue most traffic violations and other minor offenses at the beginning of the pandemic (or to take down the info, but not into custody), like in Philly.

There has also been a push to do away with pretextual stops, which includes a lot of traffic law. Not sure that has been wide spread enough, and may also be too recent, to impact these numbers.

I agree with you regarding lax enforcement, especially in the last few years. But this is also cultural. We have the technology to enforce traffic laws via sensors but even then they are implemented they are often removed by the next local election or blown to bits with buckshot.

My state has targets for acceptable rates of annual pedestrian deaths when designing intersections. I find the fact that we elect to sacrifice lives in order to bump up vehicles-per-hour stats rather disturbing. Again nothing new but helps explain why the US is an outlier.

With the history of red light camera abuses, I don't find it very surprising that the public is leery of automated enforcement.

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