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Comment by reducesuffering | Hacker News Reader

There aren’t any pedestrians…

According to the 2017 ACS Census, Idaho has a respectable amount of pedestrian traffic. So lack of pedestrians (on a per-capita basis) can't be the reason.

https://www.cdc.gov/pcd/issues/2020/20_0097.htm

I was thinking the same thing about the state that I grew up in. It has a fairly low rate.

I once lived in one of the most obese cities in the country. When this made the news on reddit, commenters looked at the google street view and noted that there was no one walking.

You’d imagine the same thing about New Mexico.

NMican here. This is big vehicle country and that could be a huge factor. Also subjectively a sudden huge growth in homelessness. It’s also just otherwise not very populace so I wonder whether there’s an odd sample problem going on. It wouldn’t take as much to move the figure here as it would a more populace state. Large swaths of population 5’5” and below too. Could actually be the shortest state in the union.

New Mexico is known for its drug problems (including alcoholism). 30% of fatalities involve alcohol on the part of the driver or the pedestrian, and 14% involve other drugs (these percentages might overlap).

https://gps.unm.edu/sites/default/files/traffic/NM_Pedestria...

New Mexico’s pedestrian fatalities have actually stayed fairly constant or even gone down a bit the last few years, during a period when the country as a whole has had a significant increase. And we’re still #2 nationwide! That’s how bad things are here.

NM has a population of around 2.1M and Florida around 22.2M. That puts NM at about 41 vehicular fatalities and Florida at about 443. That’s what I mean by odd numerical stuff. Dividing things by 100,000 is an attempt to smooth over population differences, but I’m not sold it actually makes as much difference as people assume.

Yes the DUI thing is another known problem here. Good to point it out. Don’t know that anything could be done about it. People just don’t seem to value life enough.

Too damn cold

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