Over at Vox they're writing about "A Crisis on American Roads." Part 1 is mostly about a mother whose daughter was killed in a crosswalk in Washington DC by the driver of a van. The rest of the piece claims that the increase in vans and big SUVs is responsible for our recent increase in pedestrian deaths.
I don't find that implausible at all, but I nonetheless wanted some evidence. Finally, after plowing through 2,000 words (!) I got it. But my spidey sense began to tingle when I saw this:
There are two weird things here. First, were SUVs really only 10% of all vehicles on the road in 2000? That seems awfully low compared to my memory of that period. Second, there's no line even trying to compare the growth rate of SUVs to the growth of pedestrian deaths. That seems like an odd omission.
You know the rest of the story: I decided to collect the best statistics I could find and draw a similar chart. See the footnote for details.¹ Here's what I came up with:
What you see here is, first, a huge drop in pedestrian fatalities from 1990-2010. (The decline actually began around 1970, but I didn't use those figures in the chart.) Second, there's a slow rise from 2010 to the present.
The share of big cars, however, shows nothing like this. It just goes up slowly and steadily for the entire period from 1990-2020. There's really no correlation here.
Why did pedestrian deaths go down from 1970-2010? Safety enhancement in cars certainly played a role in reducing fatalities among drivers and passengers, but not among pedestrians. Nor has anything new happened since 2010 that would cause pedestrian fatalities to go up significantly (about 50% over a single decade).
None of this is positive proof that big cars aren't at fault in recently rising pedestrian deaths. But it does mean we should be skeptical and demand better evidence. The Vox article provides two studies on the subject. The first is 20 years old and shows that light trucks and vans are more dangerous than passenger cars. No argument there. I think we can all agree on that much.
The second study is very recent and compares pedestrian death rates in different cities. It concludes, "If all [emphasis mine] light trucks were replaced with cars, over 8,000 pedestrian deaths would have been averted between 2000 and 2019." That's about 400 deaths per year. In a real-world situation in which we didn't eliminate every single light truck on the road, but instead produced a 12% reduction in order to return to the 2000 average, this comes to about 50 deaths per year, or a reduction of around 1%. That's not a meaningful result.
So: are big SUVs and light trucks responsible for our tsunami of pedestrian deaths? I doubt it. But pedestrian fatalities did suddenly spike up starting around 2010. Something else must have changed then, but it's not obvious to me what it is. However, I do have a guess:
This is not great data. It comes from the National Household Travel Survey, which is conducted about once a decade. It doesn't tell us total miles walked or anything useful like that, and the fit is not impressive. Still it does show that we're walking more: about 35% more since 2000.² Don't take this as more than a suggestion, but it certainly makes sense that if people are walking more, there are going to be more walking accidents. It might not have anything to do with cars and drivers at all.
Then again, there's also this:
Forget big cars and small cars. Forget about how much people are walking. Instead just look at something plain and simple: the number of pedestrian deaths per million vehicle miles. All vehicle miles. It turns out that our streets have gotten steadily more crowded (by about 20% since 2000), and when you adjust for that crowding the number of pedestrian fatalities has gone down, not up.
Maybe we're overthinking this. Maybe there was no crisis to begin with.
¹The NHTSA doesn't track "SUVs." The closest it comes is "Light duty vehicle, long wheel-base." which includes large passenger cars, vans, pickup trucks, and sport/utility vehicles with wheelbases longer than 121 inches.
So that's what I used. Unfortunately, this category was invented in 2007 and produced a huge discontinuity in the data. For example, vehicle miles driven dropped from 1.1 billion in 2006 to 0.6 billion in 2007 because certain vehicle categories were switched into the short-wheelbase group. I had no choice but to do some sketchy interpolation, but I doubt it introduced more than a modest amount of error.
As for the data itself, vehicle miles driven is here. Pedestrian fatalities from 1927-1989 are here. Fatalities from 1990-2005 are here. Fatalities from 2006-2020 are from the FARS database. The middle set of years is from the Governor's Highway Safety Association. The other two are from the NHTSA.
²This is all well and good, but does the amount of walking account for the drop in pedestrian deaths from 1970-2010? Did we walk a lot less during those years? Sadly, we don't have any data for that. For now it remains a mystery.
I'll get back to you when I find a way to blame cyclists.
Dislike cyclists on the roads? Build them some separate infrastucture.
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My wife's first instinct after simply reading the headline strikes me as incredibly plausible: how about people with their noses buried in smartphones stepping out into traffic?
The data on pedestrian and bicycle traffic incidents is scant and inaccurate, just as the data that KD shares here is. I'm not sure we can come to any conclusions before electric vehicles completely change the situation.
Electric cars and trucks? Or electric bicycles and scooters?
All of them. The mix of vehicles on the roads is always changing, but the introduction of EV's to the mix will result in changes that will create a whole new set of dynamics. E-bikes are faster and heavier than regular bikes. Scooters are difficult to use safely on the roads due to handling characteristics. And electric cars are almost noiseless.
For my part, I'm hoping that Americans will start to downsize their vehicles, which might help, but I'm not holding my breath.
Just speaking for myself but in my large Midwestern city traffic laws go uninforced.
It’s nuts. You’d have to see it to believe it. Just yesterday I watched 4 vehicles pass a stopped school. And I know they saw it. They all slowed, hesitated, and blew right past it.
That, and the bigger and fancier the SUV the more the driver feels immune to any danger. For themselves only.
Others, they could not care less.
sounds like China.
Agree. In my city, red lights are considered optional by numerous drivers and this has grown worse in the past five years. For what it's worth, anecdotally, I see at least one driver a day plow through a red light. Sensible drivers wait before entering an intersection on a green light. Traffic enforcement is far down the list of police priorities. I don't know about motives other than people in goblin mode. Texters are more likely to sit on green lights.
Actually, what exactly is "far UP the list of police priorities"? Other than Dunkin of course.
Cell phones?
Bingo. By 2010 smartphones were making big inroads compared to the old flip phones.
That is the first thing I thought of, cell phones, or rather, the use of cell phones that are not just cell phones, ones that include audio and video.
In my neighborhoods we have a mix of streets adorned with sidewalks, some without and I cannot tell how many times I have cautioned those walking in the street, many times with a sidewalk, with their backs to traffic while listening to or viewing a video, it is crazy, especially those crossing intersections without using their "God given" capabilities to avoid danger.
My gut is the 1970 - 2010 trend is infrastructure — cross walks, sidewalks, etc. — and the countervailing trend since is the smartphone. Distracted drivers texting, pedestrians listening to podcasts and staring at a screen.
The prevalence of touch screen dashboards is likely a factor. You used to be able to adjust a variety of things, like temp and what you are listening to, without taking your eyes off the road. But now that so many cars have flat screens to control all of that you have to look at the screen. Why we outlaw texting while allowing basically the same thing as part of the car seems inconsistent.
That trend really didn't get going until the mid to late twenty teens. But it could contribute, although my car has enough voice commands to handle most tasks.
The European brands initially resisted touch screens, but have since given in. Tesla is the champion of "touchy screenbn only". Want to open the glove box or adjust the direction of the air from the heater, take your eyes off the road and look down to the touch screen.
My seat of the pants guess is the drop up to 1990 came from increasing intolerance for drunk driving. And the recent increase is cell phones and other devices, as limitholdemblog suggests.
From a totally anecdotal perspective, living in a top-ten urban core and walking for almost all of my travel, people are driving like absolute assholes, notably worse post-pandemic. I'm talking speeding up to blow red lights half a block away, completely ignoring stop signs, swinging into crosswalks with people in transit with only a few feet of clearance. Not cellphone/smart-car related, mostly in broad daylight so unlikely to be substance related. I have to watch drivers like a hawk and constantly make aggressive, piercing eye-contact to save my skin. Even still, someone almost popped me earlier this week, turning into a crosswalk from my blindspot.
I too am voting for touch screens in vehicles and cell phones. Not only do cell phones distract the driver, but if you put ear buds in a pedestrian you get the same thing, a decrease in situational awareness
Yes. And a lot of the extra pedestrian miles being logged are pedestrians wearing earbuds.
An added complication in tracking the number of SUVs on the road is the rebranding of the station wagon and the dreaded minivan into an SUV/multipurpose vehice/crossover.
This is a bit off-topic, but you've given me a chance to share my long-time continuing puzzlement about the attraction of SUV's.
In 1997, with a growing family, my wife and I decided that we needed something bigger than our sedan. I didn't know much of anything about minivans and SUV's, so we went to one of the local dealers and had him show us both. At the end of his presentation of the plus and minuses of each, I summarized what I had learned: "So you're telling me that compared to a minivan, the SUV is less spacious, has a less comfortable ride, is less safe, gets lower gas mileage, and costs $4000 more. Why is that?" His answer: "They're just popular right now."
For better or worse, we bought a minivan.
The Big Cars chart is of little interest. What should be plotted are vehicles that have near-vertical fronts. That's increasingly the case over the last decade with vehicles smaller than Big Cars (especially with mid-size SUVs).
As well as their size. There are some truly monstrous SUVs (and sedans!) on the road these days.
Also, how many of the "cars" are actually the smallest SUVs (compacts, crossovers)? Any of them? Surely some?
Cars are just getting bigger, and not just in terms of consumer preferences. The Subaru Outback is a good example of something that started out as basically a longer sedan/shorter station wagon (which had the same front profiles as sedans) and is now much taller and flatter on the front.
Mini-vans and crossovers don't count. Nor do some SUV's. Range Rover's wheel base is too short to meet the cut-off, Chevy Suburban's is long enough.
Of course, taller vehicles are all the rage--better to see the road and harder to see in front of you...
"But pedestrian fatalities did suddenly spike up starting around 2010. Something else must have changed then, but it's not obvious to me what it is. "
Smart phone usage has skyrocketed since 2010.
Distracted drivers. Distracted pedestrians.
Combination of SUV design (which wouldn’t be picked up by statistics showing the NUMBER of SUVs on the road) and greater use of smart phones.
Bingo bango.
Also road design and their resultant traffic patterns, which are very forgiving to murder machines (on the whole).
In 2000 "Vans" were the SUV of the day. There were gigantic Hummers and little "Cross-Overs" by the Japanese and Nordic manufacturers, but what we would recognize as an SUV today was rare.
Tadeuz is spot on. The gory American Id was freed by the Pandemic and the antics of the Orange Stain and his claque of mindless proto-apes.
as others have mentioned, modern cell phones seem to be a good fit with the data. distracted walking and driving appears to be extremely common these days.
I assume that the prevalence of SUV/trucks is the critical piece that causes pedestrian accidents to become pedestrian deaths.
One thing that I think is also a factor is pedestrian education. When I was a kid in the 70s we were bombarded with PSAs and school lessons about looking both ways before crossing the street.
Now it seems like at least once a day a pedestrian crosses the road (ignoring the don't walk sign) as I'm driving by and keeps their head locked facing forward, like they're refusing to look either way on principle. It really is surreal. No idea how we don't have flattened pedestrians in our city pretty much constantly.
That you can explain a crisis with a correlation does not make it not a crisis. Pedestrian deaths rising is either a problem or it is not. If increasing traffic congestion or increased pedestrian travel explains it, it is still a problem to be solved.
I am personally very skeptical that increased pedestrian travel should cause more fatal accidents. Here in Minneapolis the big problem is drivers either don't notice pedestrians or don't know what they are legally obligated to do when a pedestrian is trying to cross a road (stop). At some point more walking should lead to more attention from drivers to walkers.
The pedestrian I know who was killed last year was at high risk because of urban infrastructure decisions. He was crossing the street to get to his home from a trip to the dog park at just before dinner time in late fall. There were several infrastructure changes that would have reduced the likelihood of his death: lower road speed (it is 45mph, even though it is all residential and park where he was), sidewalks on both sides of the street and a protected way to cross the street (in the half mile between his housing complex and the dog park there wasn't even a stop sign to slow that 45mph traffic), more street lighting at intersections to give drivers an idea of what pedestrians are crossing far ahead of them.
It's likely that the pedestrian could have been more visible and the driver could have been more cautious (he was likely driving a bit over the speed limit given the extreme physical damage he caused), but we have the option to design our infrastructure so that small distractions or mistakes don't end up deadly.
We're building more large housing complexes along very fast roads in the suburbs, and the residents want to go out for walks. We need to engineer for that reality.
It seems so obviously smart phone use. Both by pedestrians and drivers. It can’t be a coincidence that it started going up around 2010, when the iPhone became the de-facto phone for just about everyone (and then android, etc...). Before 2010, people used their phones to talk, and that was about it. How quaint. After that period, their whole lives were in their phones, and multi-task use of them was rampant. This goes for drivers and pedestrians. So now you have distracted drivers and pedestrians, that’s practically a guarantee of great deaths. The cars don’t have to be much bigger to make a difference in a collision with a pedestrian. A 2000 pound car driving 35 hitting a distracted pedestrian stepping off the curb while texting a friend can be just as deadly as 4000 pound SUV hitting them at 35. Ok, perhaps more deadly, but you’re not likely to do well with a 2000 pound car in those circumstances.....
Since 1980 all 50 states have allowed right turn on red EXCEPT where signs prohibit such turns
Is the problem that cities are not trying hard enough to keep pedestrian death rates down under the guise of keeping the traffic moving? There are very few "No right turn on red" intersections in my city. I suspect there should be more of them.