Enforcement of traffic offenses is down 95% in the past 10 years in San Francisco. Explains the outcome and the claims that "crime is down"
I think about that guy sometimes and wonder what his version of the story is. Further I sometimes question if he was ever in danger and I was just being overly cautious.
It reminded me of the movie Due Date:
Peter Highman: How have you made it this far? How have you not run yourself over in a car?
Ethan Tremblay: I've done that.
Peter Highman: How have you survived? That's my question.
Ethan Tremblay: Mostly luck.
I never put on headphones till I was inside the train, as a rule of thumb.
Data: https://www.chp.ca.gov/programs-services/services-informatio.... SWITRS hasn't published a report since 2020 due to the pandemic, but that works perfectly fine for my purposes because I'd have probably had to discard those years for other reasons, and since we're talking about a ten- or fifteen-year trend I'm perfectly okay coming to a conclusion based on data from 2011 to 2020. Traffic fatalities per city are in section 8 chart E.
Fatalities have also not been increasing per mile traveled. Data: https://vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/indicators/daily-miles-travele...
I choose traffic fatalities as the metric because federal and state reporting laws mean that these numbers will be effectively complete - there is no sampling or selection effect, unlike numbers about traffic enforcement.
Even if deaths are relatively flat, they should be going down as older, less safe cars age out of the fleet of vehicles on the road. As time goes on, a greater percentage of vehicles have better crash safety, ABS, traction control, better airbag systems, and 'driver assistance' aids.
Make sure any stats you do cite include pedestrian and cyclist injuries, but note that exposure data for them is exceptionally poor, because they are typically not included in traffic survey data collected by contractors hired by the government to do traffic counts.
Overall pedestrian and cyclist deaths have shot up, by the way, and are the highest ever.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/26/1184034017/us-pedestrian-deat...
Your data shows that traffic citations are down. It doesn't show anything about whether that's due to lax enforcement or less occurrences.
In fact, if you look at a lot of those graphs, they hit a low point in 2020 - right when covid WFH would have drastically reduced a lot of traffic, and in turn, traffic crimes.