For some reason a chart of pedestrian deaths has been making the rounds in my Twitter feed:
I replotted the chart to show pedestrian deaths per capita, which looks like this:
This is very peculiar. Whether you look at the raw data or whether you adjust for population or vehicle miles driven you get the same result: pedestrian deaths went steadily down for 20 years and then abruptly turned upward starting in 2009.
Nobody knows why. The obvious explanation is cell phones/social media, but that's become the go-to explanation for anything that starts around 2009. I'm skeptical of this because the change in 2009 is so sharp. There's no plateau for a few years and there's not really even much noise. The trend just suddenly turns around and starts increasing at a steady rate for the next five or six years. Besides, the CDC says that distracted driving has gone down since 2010, not up.
Of course, the other possibility is distracted pedestrians, but people get really mad if you suggest this (you're "blaming the victim"). And since there don't seem to be any reliable measures of distracted walking, it's hard to make a case for this anyway.
Anybody got any ideas that don't involve cell phones or social media?
2008-2009 was the start of the smartphone revolution. First Android came out in fall of 2008.
Maybe more people thinking (correctly or not) that pedestrians always have the "right of way" whether or not they are in a cross walk. Maybe too many people think that vehicles are obliged to avoid hitting them.
I have no idea.
Hello, Kevin. It's just another result of "The Deplorables" embracing their Inner Scrooge. "This is MY road, you fucking pedestrian! Die!"
With all the newly giant cars around in 2009, does their aggressiveness increase as they drive through poorer neighborhoods?
I really want to see this broken down by party affiliation.
"[D]oes their aggressiveness increase as they drive through poorer neighborhoods?" Of course. Most poorer neighborhoods outside Appalachia are populated by "NOT Americans" and thus expendable at best.
I won't get angry if you blame the victims. It might really be true that pedestrians are in more danger when they are distracted by texting. There's also baby boomers swelling the ranks of old folks walking about, with their declining hearing and agility.
Looking for an explanation other than smart phones is like acknowledging that water is falling from clouds but wanting a different explanation for why I get why wet when I go outside.
Has anyone correlated the increase to the types of vehicles involved?
Duncan Black did a bit a few months ago about changes in design to pickups & SUVs to make them more "aggressive" looking which also made the front end of the vehicle take up more of the view radius, leading to more accidents, etc.
GMF, I like that explanation for part of it, but I still thinking the combination of distracted driving and distracted walking explains most of it. For the drivers, it might not just be phones, either--that's when dashboard displays started showing up in numbers. Touch screen radio controls have to be LOOKED AT to be operated, because they have no tactile feedback like old radio buttons. And there are often menus to be waded through, which REALLY saps attention.
Distracted driving has gone DOWN? Not where I live.
I bike more commonly than I drive where I live and I do notice drivers (and pedestrians) absorbed in their cell phones. I do see a bit less of that these days, though maybe that's just because our traffic volume has yet to fully recover to pre-Covid levels.
I may very well be that people are just walking (and biking) more. A quick search of a couple of different databases suggest households without a car were on a steady decrease over decades and then started increasing at least as early as 2011. It is possible that the 2008 crash may have contributed to this inflection point. Maybe also worthwhile looking at city level data to help identify factors that might be contributing.
It's the vehicles themselves:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/business/suv-sales-best-sellers.html
Why does it matter that it's SUVs and trucks and "crossovers" hitting pedestrians instead of sedans?
This is why:
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/labs/death-on-foot/graphics/NU_062018-Jeep-Honda-size-FULL.png
https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2018/06/28/suvs-killing-americas-pedestrians/646139002/
This isn't a goddamn mystery at all. People who have been paying attention to this know all about it:
1) Our streets are rarely actually streets, but roads and stroads. TLDR explanation: traffic speed and volume is prioritized over all else.
2) Our drivers have been switching to driving more and more "light trucks" than passenger-oriented sedans, which are far deadlier to pedestrians.
Here's a chart on the percentage of sales of each vehicle type:
https://smartgrowthamerica.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SGA-DxD2020-SUV-Chart-and-Diagram-20210224_Vehicle-Type-Chart-1024x745.png