Why So Many Pedestrians in the U.S. Are Dying at Night

Car lights are blindingly bright now.

Manufacturers have even remounted them so they "float" and when you hit a bump they point up for a moment. Makes for fun times on rough roads.

People won't slow down at night, either.

The article doesn't mention window tint...but I couldn't imagine that is having 0 effect.

Anecdotally about half the cars I see have very dark tint on the driver and passenger window, making it nearly impossible to see a pedestrian through it at night when making a turn. I know tinting these windows used to be illegal in my city, but a few years ago they stopped doing emissions testing and that was the main place they ticketed violations for tint, so its completely unenforced now.

I recently moved to another state and failed the driver's license eye exam for the first time in my life. For years I've been annoyed with poor reflectivity on street signs and lane markers, now I know that it really was that my night vision had declined. Two interesting things from this: my optometrist has never commented on my night vision being impaired beyond asking if I'm bothered by approaching headlights causing glare and the last time my vision was checked by a state government was sometime in the mid 1990s. I don't have reason to drive at night all that often and usually wear my glasses at night anyway but I wonder how long my vision has been impaired enough that I should have been legally required to wear glasses, at least at night. Wonder how many other people have similar night vision that has slowly declined over time without them noticing nor their state knowing about it.

In Seattle, someone was intentionally hitting pedestrians at night while recording video.

Seattle Police video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_T1nazrm28U

In Estonia and Finland it's mandatory to wear reflectors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ES5rdzutEeo / https://www.foreignersinfinland.fi/post/the-great-finnish-in...

I realize now why my winter jacket has reflectors on the wrists, I bought it in Iceland...

The rising rate of nighttime deaths (unlike the daytime rate, which is falling) seems unique to the US, and the article suggests cellphone use is part of the problem:

It’s perhaps not surprising then that Americans spend nearly three times as much time interacting with their phones while driving as drivers in Britain, according to smartphone data collected by Cambridge Mobile Telematics.

I would not be surprised if phone use by pedestrians is also higher in the US - which is not to suggest that pedestrians are largely responsible for the rise.

> “It’s purely an effect of daylight or darkness — and it’s huge for pedestrians,” said Michael Flannagan, a retired professor at the University of Michigan.

> In the dark, pedestrians are harder to see than other road users. They typically don’t wear reflective gear or lights, and their outerwear is often dark in color. American roads also weren’t particularly engineered with this risk in mind.

I often drive around Ann Arbor (home to U of M), and there are a lot of oblivious idiot pedestrians, both day and night. For the college students, I sometimes wonder if their dangerous actions are assertions of their social status. "See all the grown-ups in fancy cars slow / brake / swerve for me!"