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?
The graph cries out for a line "per pedestrian mile walked". If the number of pedestrians increased starting in 2009, that would be a simple explanation.
Seems very unlikely the country saw a 50% increase in pedestrian miles walked over the course of the 2010s.
It's undoubtedly, like most things, a combination of factors - not just one easy explanation. There are several things working together, as some have noted below.
-More people living and walking in city centers, as living downtown enjoyed a burst of popularity among young people during those years (that may change now).
-larger and more deadly vehicles with more blind spots, especially pickups and SUVs.
-lowered standards for licensing drivers and inspecting vehicles for safety (the trend has been away from requiring regular vehicle inspections and driver's tests are not what they used to be. I also doubt vision tests are enforced as well as they were.).
-more distractions for both drivers and walkers, not just from smart phones but from the whole intense media environment - digital billboards, video screens and surround sound systems in cars, etc.
-driving safety campaigns in the media also seems to be a thing of the past.
It's undoubtedly, like most things, a combination of factors - not just one easy explanation.
I'd say your "undoubtedly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. To my eyes, a data plot with such an abrupt and clean break from "declining" to "increasing" is more consonant with a single major factor than multiple factors.
My sense is that, for whatever reason, humans exhibit a bias against "non-complex" explanations that acts to reduce the accuracy of their perceptions (just like any other bias). In other words, nature sometimes indeed favors complex phenomena. And nature sometimes favors simple phenomena. It really depends on the situation.
I’d be interested to see a plot of estimated homeless population. I would expect them to be far more likely to be struck and killed by a car (since lots of them sit right by the side of the road and they probably stumble into the road fairly often)
Isn’t there an existing story that homeless population went up and stayed up after the 2008 recession?
Umm, electric vehicles (and hybrids)? They are much quieter than gas-powered vehicles and pedestrians used to judging by sound can step in front of them. This was true of the Prius for sure. It was shocking how quiet it was (and is).
For at least the last ten years, they have been required to generate an "I'm moving" noise when moving at low speeds. My Prius starts making the noise as soon as I lift my foot from the brake pedal.
But the older cars are still a problem.
I just don’t think there were nearly enough electric or hybrids at that point.
Honesty it feels like a possible methodology change.
I like the way you think sir. Eliminate the obvious and easily checked before committing more resources.
The road toll can be traced back to the disastrous decision to repeal the regulation requiring a person with a red flag to walk in front of a car to warn the public of its approach.
LOL.
Kevin--We DEFINITELY need a function to "Like" a comment.
👍👍👍👍👍
Don't forget to blow a bugle and fire off a gun when you come to an intersection. That was in the MA laws from the very early days of motor vehicle. Probably should bring that back too.
The timing is only off by a century or so but I like your idea.
Prelude of our bloodier robot future, when the machines turn on us.
Or maybe it's SUVs the size of Sherman Tanks with massive blind spots that can't see pedestrians.
The front-end grills on these huge, compensating-for-other-issues pickups are so large these days, you wouldn't see an NBA team using the crosswalk in front of you.
Oops, I just saw the thread on this below. What they said.
😂😂
These would be accidents at very low speed. The graph on top is "fatalities", not likely at those speeds.
You sure? We've had a number of fatal accidents in DC when large vehicles including buses do a right turn on red without noticing the pedestrian in the crosswalk.
EV’s are extremely rare creatures on US roads
A small reminder from a Swede
there are more of them than you think, especially with hybrids included. still not enough to make a huge impact (so to speak) on numbers of pedestrian fatalities but possibly a factor among others.
Like Peter Stormare in the Big Lebowski, Sture is an expert.
Correct!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car_use_by_country
2009 is when Ford changed out their truck platform with the new front grill that runs pedestrians down, rather than over the hood. Which was broadly copied. Shortly after/ simultaneously to that, Light Truck sales (which is to say trucks, suv's, crossovers, and vans) went from basically split even market share with Sedans from 2000-2012 to expanding market share drastically to a 75/25 split today for new purchases. Inching up a ~percentage point of the total fleet every year. Combine all of that and the overall vehicle fleet pedestrians encounter evey year are just more dangerous than the year prior.
Your comment about light truck and SUV hood heights is spot-on. And as someone who regularly drives in NYC, there's a lot to be said for the distracted pedestrian theory as well. People here regularly blindly cross side streets against the lights while transfixed by whatever's on their phone screen, or they're busy texting away.
I can believe the front grill change had something to do with it - but FRED data appears to show that light trucks as a proportion of all autos was on the rise pretty much nonstop from 1981 - 2005, then during the 2008 recession there was a brief respite, and a return to trend in ~2009 (accelerating even more after 2015). I'm not really seeing those changes correlate with pedestrian death rates above.
That's a good point. Maybe the number of pedestrian/car accidents isn't up. But the injuries are more often fatal.
I was gonna say, rise of SUVs? Or change in car size in general?
The report from the GHSA is here:
https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Ped%20Spotlight%202021%20FINAL%203.23.21.pdf
Lots more data (though not pre-2010). A few noteworthy points:
--Almost all of the increase in pedestrian fatalities is an increase in fatalities at night (daylight fatalities are relatively flat). [p. 17]
--Sharp increase in light truck sales (inc. SUVs) continues; sales of passenger cars decline after 2014. [p. 23, with chart that seems to correlate with chart on p. 17]
--Drunk pedestrians a bigger factor than drunk drivers in pedestrian fatalities, and highest in age group 55-64. [pp. 19-20]
--Among the dozen or so recommendations for reducing pedestrian fatalities: better street lighting and wider use of automatic emergency braking systems in light trucks and cars.
One of the things I really like about our 2020 Leaf is all the warning sensors with audible, visual, and steering wheel shaker warnings, plus emergency braking. Backing out of a tight parking space with bigger cars on either side, we get warnings from the rear quarter sensors as soon as the rear of the car starts to clear the blockers and WAY before we'd be able to see the approaching car or pedestrian. It has a much better rear camera than our Prius as well. Same type of warnings and breaking for the front - approaching cars/pedestrians trigger a warning a lot earlier than you can get sight in tight spaces.
I'd say massive truck grills plus people moving back into cities to live and work before the pandemic.
Maybe a good question is why pedestrian deaths were declining before 2009. Were people walking less and driving more before the great recession? Perhaps young Millennials, initially disdainful of automobiles and youthfully fearless, gradually succumbed to the demands of work, marriage and parenthood and got wheels.
I was wondering the same thing.
There's a golden opportunity here for Kevin to expand his sources of income. Follow the example of this imaginative Australian entrepreneur:
https://www.change.org/p/replace-harold-scruby-and-his-pedestrian-council
You could probably gain some clarity if you could drill down into the data a bit. What's the data look like by state? Urban vs rural? Time of day?
The person driving the 2 ton missile should probably have more culpability you know?
Shirley it must somehow be the fault of Fox…
We became desensitized to death by the multiple series run of When Animals Attack.
It's lead. And don't call me Shirley.
😉
Saw an article not too long ago about the monster truck/grill effect on pedestrian deaths, can't remember where, that looked at the data pretty closely. These newer vehicles are death machines, and are directly responsible for much if not most of the spike.
i think this is the most plausible explanation: this dynamic is turning more truck/pedestrian incidents into fatalities. It very unlikely to be smartphone related, because we haven't seen a similar jump in fatalities in the many other countries where smartphone usage took off around that time (the iPhone was introduced in 2007).
I suspect it might also be related to the reduced visibility from the cab of those trucks than from the previous generations of trucks where the drivers had better visibility of what was in front of them.
Yep. A double whammy: the vehicle itself becomes a more efficient killing machine, because of the massive, tank-like grill, and the very same phenomenon reduces driver visibility.
Gee, I wish we had a government bureau that supervised the development and manufacturing of transporation equipment with an eye toward public safety...
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-03-11/the-dangerous-rise-of-the-supersized-pickup-truck
"Petro-masculinity"
In the current Atlantic online:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/02/pedestrian-road-safety-deaths-buttigieg/622863/
Did they blame wokeness?
Last two new cars I've owned, I found that the A-Pillar airbags create large blind spots. More that once, I've started to make left turns only to find that there was a pedestrian in the cross walk that I couldn't see. This also blocks small vehicles like motorcycles and bicycles to my right.
With my latest car, I've acquired a habit of shuttling my head left and right as I make a turn to see around the pillar.
It's down to electing Obama - it drove the Republicans so nuts that they drive angry all the time, and knock down POC.
I think that's it. Yes. The azzoles have embraced their "My Little Demon".
More people walking, trying to get their 10,000 steps? Fitbit was launched 2009.
If the death rate is connected to different structure of vehicles (greater weight?) there should be a separation between trends of incidents or just injuries and deaths. This seems so obvious that I would think those who are paid to look into such things would already have done it, but maybe not.
It's such an obvious thing, that, my guess is the data either aren't compliled or aren't reliable when it comes to non-fatalties.
Anybody got any ideas that don't involve cell phones or social media?
Why, yes. It was 2009.
The Great Recession stressed people and Obama was elected so Republicans assumed it was all his fault when they ran people down because getting revenge was their right.
Is there information about how many of these drivers were Republicans? Really the obvious answer.
Another possibility is Boomers getting old. The combination of slower reaction times and bigger faster vehicles is a recipe for interesting times.
I also like the "Republican hypothesis" above. I've had to stop riding a bicycle in my right-wing neighborhood as I'm considered an offensive target. Mind you they don't mind a motorcycle.
"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"
I think the chart is a bit deceiving in that regard. There *is* a plateau from 2000-2007ish, then it plunges, then it shoots up. The plunge seems to me to be caused by the 2008 recession, when people drove less, and it masked what would have been a plateau and then upward turn. So it could be a more gradual turnaround than it looks.
As to what it is, I agree with folks who think it's the rise of SUVs. They really began to shoot up in the early 2000s and that tracks with the turnaround in deaths. Collisions between pedestrians and cars were more likely to end in a fatality when the car is the HMS Titanic.
As to what it is, I agree with folks who think it's the rise of SUVs
I don't think many of us are attributing this phenemenon to the "rise of SUVs," which has been occuring since the 1980s. Rather, we're attributing it to a sudden design change in SUVs by Ford that was rapidly copied by other carmakers.
Besides cell phones which is probably the right answer, it seems like a huge segment of the population, Baby Boomers, are now close to or over 70. They are all almost retired and still driving, with bad eyesight, poor reflexes, and all the other fun things aging does to your body. So it is a perfect storm of old drivers and cell phones, and it is a really bad time to walk on the side of the road.
This. The average age of pedestrian fatalities has risen, too.
Rudolph Milner did nothing wrong.
The data don't fit the "aging population" hypoethesis. This is a gradual demographic trend that has been playing out over decades. But the fatalities in question appear as though a switch was flipped in 2009. The phone explanation is more plausible on the face of it, but here, too, the explanation unravels when we look at the data from other countries that likewise saw an explosion in the use of smart phones (and also have aging populations).
I'd be interested to see comparable data from countries that have a similar mix of cars/SUVs and autobrands. Canada is the obvious candidate. They drive large-grilled trucks and SUVs in large numbers, too, don't they?
Our local newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal yesterday noted the rise is local pedestrian deaths and included a map showing where each of the 106 deaths last year occurred. They were highly concentrated in the poorest and most crime ridden parts of town. Surprisingly there were a number of deaths on one of the city's two interstates, I-40.
Perhaps the rise in homelessness is a contributing factor.
Just as a general comment: if the age distribution of the victims changed over along with the growth in numbers it would point to a behavior or age related cause. This data is likely available.
It's not just that it turns around, it just keeps rising.
Alcohol use is a major contributor to pedestrian fatalities, but there is no reason to think the number of drunks wandering the streets is something that is becoming more common every year.
Similarly, if it were just social media distraction, that would have plateaued by now. Smart phone saturation happened a while ago.
You could get a very modest rise as Boomers age. Older pedestrians are at higher risk. But the rise seems too big for that to be the cause.
It seems to me that the slow turnover to larger trucks with higher grills seems to be the biggest factor.
It seems to me that the slow turnover to larger trucks with higher grills seems to be the biggest factor.
Yes, except it's not slow. The data show an abrupt reversal in the many-years-of-declining-fatalities trend, which seems consonant with the introduction of a major design change by Ford (and then rapid emulation by other manufactuers) in 2009.
On the victims side you could blame speeding, drunk driving and distracted driving all of which increased a lot during COVID
From the drivers standpoint most of the pedestrian accidents happened in urban centers, at night and at non intersection locations according to some websites.
COVID changed our outlook on multiple levels. We no longer want to exercise in crowded gyms - so a walk along a two lane road, or city street, might be more our style now. And at night there's less people around. COVID has made "solitary confinement" more acceptable and we are learning to adapt to it. In some cases badly..........
Covid hit in 2009?
No but it did force far too many people to begin jogging, at night along urban streets.
There are far too many things that affect our ability to drive safely - distractions being the main one and speed being the other.
COVID just added to the stats over the last couple of years.
We have some beautiful tree lined streets here in town. The street lights do NOT light up the sidewalks or breakdown lanes enough due to the cover the trees provide. When jogging you are only seen briefly as you get in the vicinity of the street light pole then you disappear again as you get under the tree canopy. Very few joggers where reflective clothing around here........
Sure, but my point is: we're discussing a phenomenon that abruptly started eleven years before Covid arrived.
Increases in driving speeds might be a factor. It has been reported that speeds increased during the pandemic. My sense is that speeds started increasing before that
Off Topic but tangentially related.
We had to take the I Drive Safely course and tests to get a reduction in our car insurance. Wife said the reduction could be up to 25%. Most likely it will be 1%.
Anyway we are certified old coots. Me 86 and her 75. She took the young coots test and I took the ancient coots test. The course lasted 4 hours!!! I almost fell asleep and needed two pee calls and a cup of coffee. My test really empfasized how old coots are failing in physical strength, eyesight, hearing and processing what is going on.
I missed 5 or so of the test questions and the wife missed 2. This is out of hundreds of questions.
How many states have passed "You can drive right through parade groups if you don't like the reason for the demonstration" laws?
I can't remember how many stories I read where some idiot decided to drive right through demonstration crowds
Lax enforcement of traffic laws. When I was a young adult, everyone was in terror of getting a speeding ticket, or a stop sign ticket, or even getting stopped for not using a turn signal. Now, for whatever reason -- maybe our descent into libertarian hell? -- there is far more speeding than I ever remember and people do all kinds of crazy shit without consequence.
Of course, this is probably wrong because nothing changed precisely in 2009. But it's something I had to get off my chest.
I’ve noticed a marked increase in the number of people who just wander straight into traffic never bothering to look at the traffic much less heed things like crosswalks and traffic lights. Most of these offenders (but by far not all) appear to be homeless.
The reason why people do this can well be varied: drunk, drugged, insane, or as a way to satisfy the desire to be “seen”. Or they can just be so many jackanapes.
Without knowing two other charts I don't think even the wise speculation of this blog is enough.
One is the ratio of pedestrian accidents to pedestrian deaths.
Two is whether there was an increase in the number of pedestrians.
Us Cycling fatalities, which I checked, has the same sort of graph, but not nearly as much of a swing.
Wait ..............................
Found the answer: e-scooters are counted as pedestrians. Those sort of emerged about five to ten years ago.
I'm intrigued by the comments above noting the redesign of trucks around this time. The first thing I thought of: 2008/2009 was when car manufacturers released the new generation of muscle cars: Camaro, Challenger, etc. I attribute a lot of bad and aggressive driving to those cars, though my evidence is only anecdotal.