Canada, unlike (most of) the US, has headlight rules that mandate that they stay on during the day. I don't think this is a place where they can be treated the same.
Do you have any evidence they are the same? Headlights vary on trim level - upselling specifically for brighter headlights is common in the US - and as far as I know none of this data includes trim level. I would expect that which trim levels are available varies a little from the US to Canada, and which are taken varies quite a bit more than that.
So by default we should expect this to vary some amount, there's causal reason to expect it to be different based on the different law, and it would explain the variation we observe. This is not sufficient to conclude the difference between CA and US is based on different highlights, but it is sufficient to refute "it is different between CA and US, therefore it can't be highlights," which is what I said.
Not only are the oncoming headlights blinding, but the increased brightness of the LED headlights of my own car seems to reduce the visibility of everything outside of its radius. Just too much contrast for my eyes to handle. The light intensity paradoxically make the night feel darker.
I would agree, if only from my own anecdotal experience. Oncoming headlinghts can be blinding. The SUVs and Pickups _seem_ to have higher headlight locations, although that would be easy to check. Suburban roads are usually narrower. Are the pedestrians walking on the same side as the vehicle or on the safer facing-traffic side? If they are on the same side and there is opposing traffic, reduced visibility could be a factor. Has anyone actually asked a driver what went wrong? This assumes that the incident was accidental ;-)
According to the CDC's mortality data, the per capita pedestrian death rate increased from 2009 (the bottom of the Great Recession as driving and drinking became less affordable) to 2022 for
- African-Americans by 93% from 2.46 deaths per 100,000 to 4.74.
- Hispanics by 66% from 1.98 to 3.28
- Whites by 57% from 1.45 to 2.27
- Asians by 22% from 1.22 to 1.49.
For each race, the death rate wasn't a whole lot higher in 2014 than in 2007, the last year of the Bush Housing Bubble.
I would guess that Asians are the most self-disciplined and careful demographic, and their pedestrian death rate only went up about 7% from 2014 to 2022. This would suggest to me that pedestrian carelessness played a sizable role in this bad increase in pedestrian deaths.
In the section on phone use, you say that it doesn't explain why the increase is so concentrated at night. But it could easily be that phone distraction is more dangerous at night than during the day: maybe it wrecks the driver's night vision, or maybe distraction is more impactful when visibility is bad. For example, a driver during the day might notice a pedestrian far down the road and decide to refrain from using their phone until they pass, whereas in a similar scenario at night, the driver is unaware of the pedestrian, decides to check their phone, and doesn't notice the pedestrian until it's too late.
More broadly, I've long suspected that US driving culture is the most carefree among economic peers. I've heard that in most other countries, licenses are harder to get and easier to lose. The US vs Canada cellphone data supports the carefree hypothesis. Other data to test it might be rates of license revocations or rates of new drivers passing their first driving test. The driving culture theory wouldn't explain the post-2009 timing or the concentration at nighttime by itself, but it could combine with one of the other factors to produce the specific effects we're seeing here.
Are American drivers more impatient and willing to take risks near pedestrians?
As a runner, I am on the streets dozens of miles per week and have noticed a big change in driver behavior in the past 15-20 years. I have lived in multiple states and travel frequently. All over the US, I see the same change: drivers are a lot more impatient with and willing to take additional risks near pedestrians. They are also unreasonably hostile.
I can't tell you the number of times I am in the middle of a crosswalk and a car rolls the stop sign and guns it toward me, expecting me to dash out of the way. I throw my arms up in a what-the-heck gesture, and the response I get is f*ck you or the middle finger. The feeling I get is that people increasingly have no patience, even to wait three seconds for someone to run across a crosswalk. It did not used to be this way.
Our American mobile-phone driven internet culture is one of instant gratification and hostility to anyone that doesn't serve our purposes or share our sympathies. Perhaps my experience is just a coincidence and not the root cause of pedestrian fatalities in the US. Whatever it is, the hostile driving trend is not good.
Same. A truck almost high me and my son (in a stroller) while we cross the street. The driver yelled at ME for almost causing the crash even though he was turning right on red without stopping and could barely see over the dashboard of his work truck.
And i live in a dense college town not suburban sprawl!
Sidewalks are also just not adequate in many places when I run. They stop and jump the the other side of the street. They don't exist at all or are in such disrepair that it's not safe to run on. I don't *want* to be in the road, but there is often no other option!
A friend of mine was hit while running through a crosswalk in a residential suburb. Knocked down but not seriously hurt.
Running through crosswalks is really dangerous. The driver doesn't expect you as as a pedestrian to be covering distance at the speed you are and gets angry at you for messing up his "Is-Was" calculation. A driver looks onto the sidewalk left and right at a spot where he has learned that a pedestrian will be a threat and doesn't see you because you haven't reached that spot yet. But you will still reach the crosswalk from a point *upstream* from that spot at a time that will cause a collision because you are moving faster. "Where the fuck did he come from?!!" Especially in the dark because his headlights aren't pointed at you, no matter how reflective you are. It's the same reason why riding bicycles on sidewalks and through crosswalks is dangerous at any time, and why cyclists must have forward-facing headlights at night, even where there are streetlights like in cities. If you are a good runner, you are probably moving almost as fast as utilitarian cyclists. You ought to check speed and walk through crosswalks. Have you tried that, to see if it reduces hostility? You will get seen with more time to spare for the driver to process your presence, and it's easier for you to take evasive action at walking speed. Even though you have the right of way no matter how fast you are running, you could be just dead right. Also, if the driver has his phone held against his left ear with his left shoulder, he won't see you at all coming from his left. (This was more of a thing before SmartPhones I think.)
I think many motorists just resent "joggers" who are out in the sidewalks and crosswalks, and often running on the asphalt traveled lanes, gumming up the car traffic for no good reason, being all thin and healthy sneering at the shlubs in their cars. (I know you don't do that, but that's what motorists think of you.) At least cyclists can pretend they are just trying to get to work, and one bike reduces over-all congestion especially at intersections even if cars have to negotiate past us mid-block. Cyclists are moving the same direction as motor vehicles and with discipline behave predictably like vehicles...except for bicycles ridden by homeless people. Runners on the sidewalk and roads are moving in any old direction and are neither fish nor foul, too fast to be predictable but not really obeying vehicle rules.
We have a law in Ontario (?10 yr ago) that motor vehicles must give us cyclists 1 (or 1.5 I forget) metre clearance when overtaking. It was pretty well observed at the beginning. Many still do, but many others don't anymore. I put it down to new immigrants who came here after the publicity around the law died down and don't obey it because they don't do that back home in India. I find women particularly will go by at full speed with inches to spare, the apparent excuse being that there was traffic coming the other way and they couldn't move over far enough. ("What? Slow *down*? Brake?! Ha Ha.") Unless it's a tiny car, most cars will have to crowd over the yellow centre line a bit in order to give 1 metre. And if there is a big 4X4 coming the other way...
Speaking of 4X4s, I find pickup-truck drivers *don't* crowd me, and there are a lot of them out here in the suburbs and rural regions.
As cyclists and motorcyclists say, "Every collision is our fault." Drivers aren't going to cut you any slack. Always be thinking, "What am I going to do if this driver waiting to pull out hasn't seen me or isn't going to give me the right of way?" I think pedestrians, especially "joggers", have to do the same. If you're waving your arms at a driver in the crosswalk, you left it too late.
I think this is worth following up on. Drivers today seem much more emotional, less tolerant.
I’ll add one more thing to check. Reading the SF Chronicle on this topic they mentioned that in SF there are a number of “hot spots” for pedestrians getting hit by cars. It wasn’t clear why these few roads were more dangerous. Maybe closely studying these areas would provide clues.
The follow up analysis has been fascinating. I want to highlight a conversation that is happening here in Europe that may not be as known in the US - specifically a study that just came out that what influences people not speeding is not new speed limits, but the width of the streets themselves and that areas that have successfully enforced reduced speed limits seems to tied to where they've widened sidewalks and narrowed the street itself. It made me wonder if there has been a change in how suburban streets are developed? Are those streets wider such that at night there is more difficulty in seeing people leading to the increase in deaths?
That conversation has been happening in the US as well. It's much more influential on urban street engineers than suburban. My perception is that those trends "trickle down" (very slowly) from urban areas to suburban areas, but it would be interesting to test.
I wonder if another US-Canada comparison could be helpful here - while Canada has some denser suburbanization compared to the US (especially near large cities like Toronto), a lot of sububan Canada looks pretty similar to the suburban US.
This is also my instinct regarding the cause. Anecdotally near me I have seen a lot of population growth in inner ring suburbs and particularly in commercial-suburban areas with wide arterial roads and high speed limits - or low posted speed limits which the roads are clearly not designed for and are not followed in practice.
I imagine this is where housing costs are lowest because the built environment is very unfriendly for pedestrians and people often cross a 4-6 lane road mid-block since crosswalks are so far apart. I assume population growth in these type of areas is driving the increase in pedestrian deaths.
My darkness-related theories: massive dashboard screens, shiny dashboards that reflect light, or automatic headlight errors (too bright or too dim) are blinding and/or confusing drivers at night!
I still don't see any analysis of urban street design in this analysis. Broad statistics may not reveal the real problem. Tie driving speed to road/street design from analysis of particular streets with high incident rates. Look at what in the configuration allows for the typical person to comfortably drive faster.
I made the below comment to the original article.
You should read "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" by Charles Marohn or "Killed by a Traffic Engineer" by Wes Marshall. It's the way we design streets for urban development that began in the mid 20th Century. It is exacerbated by the huge amount of automobile oriented suburban sprawl recently built in the sun belt and the South. The streets, particularly the arterial roads are designed to comfortably drive 40, 50, 60 miles an hour regardless of the what the signs say. 40mph and over kills The tight urban street networks in older urban cores like Manhattan and European cities make these speeds nearly impossible. I live in the Los Angeles area where pedestrians and bicyclists are regularly killed on suburban roads that were designed to "highway standards". if we want walkable cities and towns we need to design accordingly
Thank you for this comment. It’s likely a key concept to investigate to find the truth. There is no thought given in this article to reurbanization, increased walkability, coupled with legacy car infrastructure and poor urban design.
This is my guess for the US exceptionalism for these statistics too. The provision for pedestrians is poorer than just about any developed nation I've visited.
When I was working in Georgia, I found that when walking to get my lunch (I was the only one to do so), the pedestrian path would abruptly end, or cross grass, or lead nowhere, so I would habitually have to walk on the road or cross over.
Many of the zebra crossings were essentially unusable, as I didn't have the courage to cross four lanes of traffic, even with the traffic light suggesting I could.
I agree our ped infrastructure is bad, but if anything it's been improving since 2010, not getting worse, and Canada's doesn't seem to be any better, at least from the limited time I've spent in B.C. Infra doesn't really seem to explain the time and geographic trends in the data.
Interplay between traffic density and infrastructure might be relevant. When traffic increases, some of the more neglected infra that used to be somewhat unsafe might now be very unsafe, especially at night when drivers may be overwhelmed by more glare from oncoming cars.
You might not see this in the comparison countries for a variety of reasons. They may simply have invested in better infrastructure in the places with the highest traffic growth. That’s the general approach in Europe and infra has gotten significantly better over the last 20 years, plus average speeds are down, so accidents are less deadly. It might well be that the intuition about SUVs or wide A pillars is correct, but other countries are better at addressing it.
Regarding phone distractedness, which is the factor that, to me. seems the most intuitive, especially given the time of the inflection point, which coincides with that of other mostly negative trends we see 'upticking' about that time, I think that there is missing information. Distraction is not a binary thing. There is a continuum. For example, I could be driving or walking and look down to simply skip to the next song on Spotify - .5 - 1.5 seconds, probably. Or, I could be looking down to manually log in to a new website - 10 seconds+. Even the 'Spotify song skip' is a level of distractedness that could have an impact, but might not be captured in the data as 'distracted'. Remember, the dead pedestrians tell no(or few) tales. Also, regarding the larger uptick for nighttime fatalities, there could be a threshold effect whereby the consequences of distractedness are magnified - e.g. the reaction times of drivers and pedestrians may be greater for a night-time 'distraction event'.
Before Spotify, you would just let the radio play on and not mess with it. Even changing stations was just a press of one of the tactile-friendly punch buttons for the pre-sets. You could do it by feel if you didn't want to take your eyes off the road even for a second. Third button over is CKLW. A cassette tape would play for 45 minutes then auto-flip and play the second side without any attention. If you wanted a playlist you recorded your own cassette. It was the job of the shotgun seat rider to manage the stock of cassettes for the road trip, handling the ejects and reloads. I miss those days.
I would like to see the age of the vehicles in accidents because a theory is the models with so much screen and data on the dash impedes driver attention on the road.
I think it's important to remember that a) social science isn't monocausal, and b) dramatic trends that attract lot of attention may be subject to a winner's curse of sorts.
There are all sorts of time trends people could investigate, but the ones that attract attention are ones that happen to show large, sustained changes. But if you have a bunch of time trends fluctuating randomly, some of them will happen to show sustained increase. But there wouldn't be a large, singular, sustained cause for that; just a lot of transient causes, or fluctuations, that happened to point in the same direction.
So I don't think it makes much sense to demand a single cause, or to be confused at the lack of one. Frankly, even if there was a single cause, it might not be possible to figure it out without running experiments on Bizarro Earth.
I think this is very true (though the sharp change in 2009 is strange).
However, for this statistic, there are practices we know will increase pedestrian and cyclist safety that the US doesn't engage in at any meaningful scale. An example is Jersey City which put a lot of work into increasing pedestrian safety and has seen amazing results. So this is a problem with a variety of treatments that we, as country, just choose not take, largely by not funding or incentivizing them.
1) How about the availability of sidewalks? The original post showed the increase in pedestrian deaths is nearly entirely on urban streets. Do we know if these deaths are occurring on streets without sidewalks? The increase in cyclists deaths makes me wonder if the demand for walking and cycling is outpacing the infrastructure in cities.
2) There might be a more complicated interaction between daylight, time, and temperature. The original post showed that nearly 30% of pedestrian deaths in 2023 occurred from October through December. That would coincide with less daylight and time changes that might disrupt people but it would still be warm enough in most places for people to be out and walking unlike the later winter months. It might be useful to break down pedestrian deaths by state and month. Or see if there is a big jump around the November time change.
Something that you didn't mention in the speed section is that speed not only affects the injuries a pedestrian receives, it also affects the possibility of a crash entirely. Not every pedestrian hit on a 50 mph facility is driven into at full speed.
Using the AASHTO stopping sight distance calculation, consider three vehicles, travelling at 50, 55 and 60 mph; they see a pedestrian crossing the street 425 feet away. The first phase of stopping is perception/reaction; the time it takes to notice the pedestrian, decide to brake and actually send the command all the way from the brain to the foot to the vehicle. That is linear by vehicle speed; the 50 mph car travels 183 feet, the 55 mph travels 202 and the 60 mph car travels 220 feet.
But then the actual braking distance is a function of the initial speed *squared*. Braking from 20 mph to a stop takes only 39 feet, braking from 40 mph down to 20 the vehicle travels 115 feet, and braking from 60 to 40 mph the vehicle travels 192 feet.
In this particular example, the 50 mph vehicle stops about a foot away from the pedestrian. The 55 mph vehicle hits the pedestrian at a speed of 26 mph, about 15% chance of death, and stops 68 feet past the pedestrian at 493 feet. The 60 mph vehicle hits the pedestrian at about 38 mph, about 45% chance of death, and stops 141 feet past the pedestrian at 566 feet.
The first 5 mph is the difference between a crash and not; the second 5 mph triples the chance of death. (Another 5 mph - 65mph starting speed - means hitting the pedestrian at 48 mph, 75% chance of death, stopping 218 feet past them in 643 feet total.)
I will note that the AASHTO standards here are conservative (the goal is to design roads that even poor drivers with bad cars in imperfect conditions can use safely), but making more 'typical' assumptions about perception/reaction time and braking rate scale the curve but do not change the overall shape. For example, reducing reaction time to 1.5 seconds and increasing the braking rate by 50% shortens the distance for the 50mph car to stop to 280 feet, but the 55 mph car is still travelling about 26 mph and the 60 mph car is still going at 37 mph at that distance.
I think the “cause” is a combination of smaller factors, in no particular order: The controls inside the car that can no longer be operated by muscle memory; ie knobs vs touchscreen.
Many more distractions- Facebook, email, etc. on the screen.
Increased phone use.
Increased hostility,aggression / less concern for fellow citizens.
Poorer outward visibility due to thicker pillars, yes- but also dark window tinting.
Occurred in 2009. Lighter, older vehicles, with better visibility went off the road and were replaced with heavier cars with worse visibility. Did other countries have similar programs? How does their vehicle age compare to the US. Can we correlate vehicle age to fatality risk?
Right Turn on Red
And similar traffic laws. Canada allows right turns on red but I don't think many European countries do. How many fatalities occur on right turns?
Road type mix
Can we compare fatality rates across country for similar roads? My prior is that more people in the US live on/near fast moving arterials than in Canada or Europe meaning they are more exposed to riskier roads.
Ped Infrastructure
There is also a question of how much pedestrian infrastructure is available at the location of the crash. Could the pedestrian have avoided being in/near the roadway if they even wanted to?
Public transit
If more public transit is available, maybe pedestrians will choose that over walking long distances or on riskier roads so they are less vulnerable. Would need to have a set of similar roads in different locations and compare their crash data and the public transit available.
Driver license requirements
How are they different between countries and states. How does that correlate with Fatality/crash rates.
Many cities are moving from Sodium lamps to LEDs. The LEDs give of a whiter/clearer light, but the light is more focused to decrease light pollution. The Sodium lamp light was very yellow/orange but lit a very large area. Hard to image this was enough but could play a role.
Vehicle Miles Travelled
Does VMT correlate with more crashes in a city? Are there areas this doesn't hold true?
I suggest examining the growth rate of e-bikes and determining if there is any correlation.
A few quick observations:
1. e-bikes are relatively fast - 20+ MPH. Most people lack experience handling bikes at that speed.
2. The lighting on the average e-bike is barely adequate, both for navigation at night and visibility to passing vehicles, both night and day.
3. Anecdotally, the adoption rate of e-bikes for cost-effective commuting, particularly within the Hispanic community, appears to be increasing rapidly.
4. Increasing numbers of children now have e-bikes, and, as a result of the greater mobility, are riding in locations they previously would have never ridden a conventional bike, much less walked.
It would be interesting to tease out e-bike vs non-e-bike deaths in the cyclist death stats (and separate legal from illegal e-bikes as well, since you mention 20+ mph—only class 3 bikes can legally go that fast) but that doesn't explain the main focus of the articles, which is pedestrians, unless they're all getting hit by e-bikes.
We know that suburban areas have worse pedestrian infrastructure, wider roads, and there are less reasons for drivers to expect pedestrians in these places. We also know that these trends are worse in newer-built suburbs, rather than older streetcar suburbs, and that these types of suburbs are especially prevalent in the Sunbelt.
At the same time, we know that in the United States there has been a trend towards increased suburbanization for households with lower incomes than in past suburban waves, increased movement to the Sunbelt in general, and increasing inability for some suburbs to maintain their infrastructure later on in its capital cycle.
We can put these things we know to get to a composite explanation: pedestrian deaths are increasing because there are increasing numbers of people (including those who may not be able to own or maintain as many cars) in the landscapes that are most dangerous for pedestrians.
Right around that time headlights got blindingly bright for oncoming vehicles, I wonder if this plays a role
Also true in Canada, though, which didn't see a corresponding increase.
It's fascinating to me that this is so different between the US and Canada, since vehicles and road design are *so* similar between the two.
Canada, unlike (most of) the US, has headlight rules that mandate that they stay on during the day. I don't think this is a place where they can be treated the same.
Ok but. The excess deaths are at night. So.
And your point is? If the lights are on all the time, you get used to them. And, likely, *have different headlights*.
Do you have any evidence that for any given model of car sold in both the US and Canada, the Canadian version has different headlights?
Of course not why am I even asking
Do you have any evidence they are the same? Headlights vary on trim level - upselling specifically for brighter headlights is common in the US - and as far as I know none of this data includes trim level. I would expect that which trim levels are available varies a little from the US to Canada, and which are taken varies quite a bit more than that.
So by default we should expect this to vary some amount, there's causal reason to expect it to be different based on the different law, and it would explain the variation we observe. This is not sufficient to conclude the difference between CA and US is based on different highlights, but it is sufficient to refute "it is different between CA and US, therefore it can't be highlights," which is what I said.
Kindly take the stuffing out of your ears.
DOT is an EXTREMELY stodgy government agency.
Not only are the oncoming headlights blinding, but the increased brightness of the LED headlights of my own car seems to reduce the visibility of everything outside of its radius. Just too much contrast for my eyes to handle. The light intensity paradoxically make the night feel darker.
I would agree, if only from my own anecdotal experience. Oncoming headlinghts can be blinding. The SUVs and Pickups _seem_ to have higher headlight locations, although that would be easy to check. Suburban roads are usually narrower. Are the pedestrians walking on the same side as the vehicle or on the safer facing-traffic side? If they are on the same side and there is opposing traffic, reduced visibility could be a factor. Has anyone actually asked a driver what went wrong? This assumes that the incident was accidental ;-)
In Europe they have auto dimming of headlights for oncoming traffic.
Not in the UK - halogen headlights cause all kinds of problems here
Interesting - is that just for high beams or for all headlights?
According to the CDC's mortality data, the per capita pedestrian death rate increased from 2009 (the bottom of the Great Recession as driving and drinking became less affordable) to 2022 for
- African-Americans by 93% from 2.46 deaths per 100,000 to 4.74.
- Hispanics by 66% from 1.98 to 3.28
- Whites by 57% from 1.45 to 2.27
- Asians by 22% from 1.22 to 1.49.
For each race, the death rate wasn't a whole lot higher in 2014 than in 2007, the last year of the Bush Housing Bubble.
I would guess that Asians are the most self-disciplined and careful demographic, and their pedestrian death rate only went up about 7% from 2014 to 2022. This would suggest to me that pedestrian carelessness played a sizable role in this bad increase in pedestrian deaths.
For the graph of this data, see:
https://www.takimag.com/article/pedestrian-logic/
this is my hypothesis, combined with more phone use from drivers and peds
In the section on phone use, you say that it doesn't explain why the increase is so concentrated at night. But it could easily be that phone distraction is more dangerous at night than during the day: maybe it wrecks the driver's night vision, or maybe distraction is more impactful when visibility is bad. For example, a driver during the day might notice a pedestrian far down the road and decide to refrain from using their phone until they pass, whereas in a similar scenario at night, the driver is unaware of the pedestrian, decides to check their phone, and doesn't notice the pedestrian until it's too late.
More broadly, I've long suspected that US driving culture is the most carefree among economic peers. I've heard that in most other countries, licenses are harder to get and easier to lose. The US vs Canada cellphone data supports the carefree hypothesis. Other data to test it might be rates of license revocations or rates of new drivers passing their first driving test. The driving culture theory wouldn't explain the post-2009 timing or the concentration at nighttime by itself, but it could combine with one of the other factors to produce the specific effects we're seeing here.
The lax licensing standards is something I'd really like to see researched. My hunch has been that it's a major compounding factor.
Are American drivers more impatient and willing to take risks near pedestrians?
As a runner, I am on the streets dozens of miles per week and have noticed a big change in driver behavior in the past 15-20 years. I have lived in multiple states and travel frequently. All over the US, I see the same change: drivers are a lot more impatient with and willing to take additional risks near pedestrians. They are also unreasonably hostile.
I can't tell you the number of times I am in the middle of a crosswalk and a car rolls the stop sign and guns it toward me, expecting me to dash out of the way. I throw my arms up in a what-the-heck gesture, and the response I get is f*ck you or the middle finger. The feeling I get is that people increasingly have no patience, even to wait three seconds for someone to run across a crosswalk. It did not used to be this way.
Our American mobile-phone driven internet culture is one of instant gratification and hostility to anyone that doesn't serve our purposes or share our sympathies. Perhaps my experience is just a coincidence and not the root cause of pedestrian fatalities in the US. Whatever it is, the hostile driving trend is not good.
Same. A truck almost high me and my son (in a stroller) while we cross the street. The driver yelled at ME for almost causing the crash even though he was turning right on red without stopping and could barely see over the dashboard of his work truck.
And i live in a dense college town not suburban sprawl!
Sidewalks are also just not adequate in many places when I run. They stop and jump the the other side of the street. They don't exist at all or are in such disrepair that it's not safe to run on. I don't *want* to be in the road, but there is often no other option!
I do a lot of biking in So California and find that riding sidewalks is a safer alternative to roads in many places.
A friend of mine was hit while running through a crosswalk in a residential suburb. Knocked down but not seriously hurt.
Running through crosswalks is really dangerous. The driver doesn't expect you as as a pedestrian to be covering distance at the speed you are and gets angry at you for messing up his "Is-Was" calculation. A driver looks onto the sidewalk left and right at a spot where he has learned that a pedestrian will be a threat and doesn't see you because you haven't reached that spot yet. But you will still reach the crosswalk from a point *upstream* from that spot at a time that will cause a collision because you are moving faster. "Where the fuck did he come from?!!" Especially in the dark because his headlights aren't pointed at you, no matter how reflective you are. It's the same reason why riding bicycles on sidewalks and through crosswalks is dangerous at any time, and why cyclists must have forward-facing headlights at night, even where there are streetlights like in cities. If you are a good runner, you are probably moving almost as fast as utilitarian cyclists. You ought to check speed and walk through crosswalks. Have you tried that, to see if it reduces hostility? You will get seen with more time to spare for the driver to process your presence, and it's easier for you to take evasive action at walking speed. Even though you have the right of way no matter how fast you are running, you could be just dead right. Also, if the driver has his phone held against his left ear with his left shoulder, he won't see you at all coming from his left. (This was more of a thing before SmartPhones I think.)
I think many motorists just resent "joggers" who are out in the sidewalks and crosswalks, and often running on the asphalt traveled lanes, gumming up the car traffic for no good reason, being all thin and healthy sneering at the shlubs in their cars. (I know you don't do that, but that's what motorists think of you.) At least cyclists can pretend they are just trying to get to work, and one bike reduces over-all congestion especially at intersections even if cars have to negotiate past us mid-block. Cyclists are moving the same direction as motor vehicles and with discipline behave predictably like vehicles...except for bicycles ridden by homeless people. Runners on the sidewalk and roads are moving in any old direction and are neither fish nor foul, too fast to be predictable but not really obeying vehicle rules.
We have a law in Ontario (?10 yr ago) that motor vehicles must give us cyclists 1 (or 1.5 I forget) metre clearance when overtaking. It was pretty well observed at the beginning. Many still do, but many others don't anymore. I put it down to new immigrants who came here after the publicity around the law died down and don't obey it because they don't do that back home in India. I find women particularly will go by at full speed with inches to spare, the apparent excuse being that there was traffic coming the other way and they couldn't move over far enough. ("What? Slow *down*? Brake?! Ha Ha.") Unless it's a tiny car, most cars will have to crowd over the yellow centre line a bit in order to give 1 metre. And if there is a big 4X4 coming the other way...
Speaking of 4X4s, I find pickup-truck drivers *don't* crowd me, and there are a lot of them out here in the suburbs and rural regions.
As cyclists and motorcyclists say, "Every collision is our fault." Drivers aren't going to cut you any slack. Always be thinking, "What am I going to do if this driver waiting to pull out hasn't seen me or isn't going to give me the right of way?" I think pedestrians, especially "joggers", have to do the same. If you're waving your arms at a driver in the crosswalk, you left it too late.
I think this is worth following up on. Drivers today seem much more emotional, less tolerant.
I’ll add one more thing to check. Reading the SF Chronicle on this topic they mentioned that in SF there are a number of “hot spots” for pedestrians getting hit by cars. It wasn’t clear why these few roads were more dangerous. Maybe closely studying these areas would provide clues.
The follow up analysis has been fascinating. I want to highlight a conversation that is happening here in Europe that may not be as known in the US - specifically a study that just came out that what influences people not speeding is not new speed limits, but the width of the streets themselves and that areas that have successfully enforced reduced speed limits seems to tied to where they've widened sidewalks and narrowed the street itself. It made me wonder if there has been a change in how suburban streets are developed? Are those streets wider such that at night there is more difficulty in seeing people leading to the increase in deaths?
That conversation has been happening in the US as well. It's much more influential on urban street engineers than suburban. My perception is that those trends "trickle down" (very slowly) from urban areas to suburban areas, but it would be interesting to test.
This is a hobbyhorse of Strong Towns.
https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/6/the-key-to-slowing-traffic-is-street-design-not-speed-limits
I wonder if another US-Canada comparison could be helpful here - while Canada has some denser suburbanization compared to the US (especially near large cities like Toronto), a lot of sububan Canada looks pretty similar to the suburban US.
This is also my instinct regarding the cause. Anecdotally near me I have seen a lot of population growth in inner ring suburbs and particularly in commercial-suburban areas with wide arterial roads and high speed limits - or low posted speed limits which the roads are clearly not designed for and are not followed in practice.
I imagine this is where housing costs are lowest because the built environment is very unfriendly for pedestrians and people often cross a 4-6 lane road mid-block since crosswalks are so far apart. I assume population growth in these type of areas is driving the increase in pedestrian deaths.
My darkness-related theories: massive dashboard screens, shiny dashboards that reflect light, or automatic headlight errors (too bright or too dim) are blinding and/or confusing drivers at night!
This is a very good observation
Phone screens can also be blindingly bright at night.
I still don't see any analysis of urban street design in this analysis. Broad statistics may not reveal the real problem. Tie driving speed to road/street design from analysis of particular streets with high incident rates. Look at what in the configuration allows for the typical person to comfortably drive faster.
I made the below comment to the original article.
You should read "Confessions of a Recovering Engineer" by Charles Marohn or "Killed by a Traffic Engineer" by Wes Marshall. It's the way we design streets for urban development that began in the mid 20th Century. It is exacerbated by the huge amount of automobile oriented suburban sprawl recently built in the sun belt and the South. The streets, particularly the arterial roads are designed to comfortably drive 40, 50, 60 miles an hour regardless of the what the signs say. 40mph and over kills The tight urban street networks in older urban cores like Manhattan and European cities make these speeds nearly impossible. I live in the Los Angeles area where pedestrians and bicyclists are regularly killed on suburban roads that were designed to "highway standards". if we want walkable cities and towns we need to design accordingly
Thank you for this comment. It’s likely a key concept to investigate to find the truth. There is no thought given in this article to reurbanization, increased walkability, coupled with legacy car infrastructure and poor urban design.
This is my guess for the US exceptionalism for these statistics too. The provision for pedestrians is poorer than just about any developed nation I've visited.
When I was working in Georgia, I found that when walking to get my lunch (I was the only one to do so), the pedestrian path would abruptly end, or cross grass, or lead nowhere, so I would habitually have to walk on the road or cross over.
Many of the zebra crossings were essentially unusable, as I didn't have the courage to cross four lanes of traffic, even with the traffic light suggesting I could.
I agree our ped infrastructure is bad, but if anything it's been improving since 2010, not getting worse, and Canada's doesn't seem to be any better, at least from the limited time I've spent in B.C. Infra doesn't really seem to explain the time and geographic trends in the data.
Interplay between traffic density and infrastructure might be relevant. When traffic increases, some of the more neglected infra that used to be somewhat unsafe might now be very unsafe, especially at night when drivers may be overwhelmed by more glare from oncoming cars.
You might not see this in the comparison countries for a variety of reasons. They may simply have invested in better infrastructure in the places with the highest traffic growth. That’s the general approach in Europe and infra has gotten significantly better over the last 20 years, plus average speeds are down, so accidents are less deadly. It might well be that the intuition about SUVs or wide A pillars is correct, but other countries are better at addressing it.
Regarding phone distractedness, which is the factor that, to me. seems the most intuitive, especially given the time of the inflection point, which coincides with that of other mostly negative trends we see 'upticking' about that time, I think that there is missing information. Distraction is not a binary thing. There is a continuum. For example, I could be driving or walking and look down to simply skip to the next song on Spotify - .5 - 1.5 seconds, probably. Or, I could be looking down to manually log in to a new website - 10 seconds+. Even the 'Spotify song skip' is a level of distractedness that could have an impact, but might not be captured in the data as 'distracted'. Remember, the dead pedestrians tell no(or few) tales. Also, regarding the larger uptick for nighttime fatalities, there could be a threshold effect whereby the consequences of distractedness are magnified - e.g. the reaction times of drivers and pedestrians may be greater for a night-time 'distraction event'.
Before Spotify, you would just let the radio play on and not mess with it. Even changing stations was just a press of one of the tactile-friendly punch buttons for the pre-sets. You could do it by feel if you didn't want to take your eyes off the road even for a second. Third button over is CKLW. A cassette tape would play for 45 minutes then auto-flip and play the second side without any attention. If you wanted a playlist you recorded your own cassette. It was the job of the shotgun seat rider to manage the stock of cassettes for the road trip, handling the ejects and reloads. I miss those days.
I would like to see the age of the vehicles in accidents because a theory is the models with so much screen and data on the dash impedes driver attention on the road.
I think it's important to remember that a) social science isn't monocausal, and b) dramatic trends that attract lot of attention may be subject to a winner's curse of sorts.
There are all sorts of time trends people could investigate, but the ones that attract attention are ones that happen to show large, sustained changes. But if you have a bunch of time trends fluctuating randomly, some of them will happen to show sustained increase. But there wouldn't be a large, singular, sustained cause for that; just a lot of transient causes, or fluctuations, that happened to point in the same direction.
So I don't think it makes much sense to demand a single cause, or to be confused at the lack of one. Frankly, even if there was a single cause, it might not be possible to figure it out without running experiments on Bizarro Earth.
I think this is very true (though the sharp change in 2009 is strange).
However, for this statistic, there are practices we know will increase pedestrian and cyclist safety that the US doesn't engage in at any meaningful scale. An example is Jersey City which put a lot of work into increasing pedestrian safety and has seen amazing results. So this is a problem with a variety of treatments that we, as country, just choose not take, largely by not funding or incentivizing them.
For sure! A useful lesson is that you can often intervene on a trend without fully understanding all of the causes of it.
I have two thoughts:
1) How about the availability of sidewalks? The original post showed the increase in pedestrian deaths is nearly entirely on urban streets. Do we know if these deaths are occurring on streets without sidewalks? The increase in cyclists deaths makes me wonder if the demand for walking and cycling is outpacing the infrastructure in cities.
2) There might be a more complicated interaction between daylight, time, and temperature. The original post showed that nearly 30% of pedestrian deaths in 2023 occurred from October through December. That would coincide with less daylight and time changes that might disrupt people but it would still be warm enough in most places for people to be out and walking unlike the later winter months. It might be useful to break down pedestrian deaths by state and month. Or see if there is a big jump around the November time change.
Something that you didn't mention in the speed section is that speed not only affects the injuries a pedestrian receives, it also affects the possibility of a crash entirely. Not every pedestrian hit on a 50 mph facility is driven into at full speed.
Using the AASHTO stopping sight distance calculation, consider three vehicles, travelling at 50, 55 and 60 mph; they see a pedestrian crossing the street 425 feet away. The first phase of stopping is perception/reaction; the time it takes to notice the pedestrian, decide to brake and actually send the command all the way from the brain to the foot to the vehicle. That is linear by vehicle speed; the 50 mph car travels 183 feet, the 55 mph travels 202 and the 60 mph car travels 220 feet.
But then the actual braking distance is a function of the initial speed *squared*. Braking from 20 mph to a stop takes only 39 feet, braking from 40 mph down to 20 the vehicle travels 115 feet, and braking from 60 to 40 mph the vehicle travels 192 feet.
In this particular example, the 50 mph vehicle stops about a foot away from the pedestrian. The 55 mph vehicle hits the pedestrian at a speed of 26 mph, about 15% chance of death, and stops 68 feet past the pedestrian at 493 feet. The 60 mph vehicle hits the pedestrian at about 38 mph, about 45% chance of death, and stops 141 feet past the pedestrian at 566 feet.
The first 5 mph is the difference between a crash and not; the second 5 mph triples the chance of death. (Another 5 mph - 65mph starting speed - means hitting the pedestrian at 48 mph, 75% chance of death, stopping 218 feet past them in 643 feet total.)
I will note that the AASHTO standards here are conservative (the goal is to design roads that even poor drivers with bad cars in imperfect conditions can use safely), but making more 'typical' assumptions about perception/reaction time and braking rate scale the curve but do not change the overall shape. For example, reducing reaction time to 1.5 seconds and increasing the braking rate by 50% shortens the distance for the 50mph car to stop to 280 feet, but the 55 mph car is still travelling about 26 mph and the 60 mph car is still going at 37 mph at that distance.
I think the “cause” is a combination of smaller factors, in no particular order: The controls inside the car that can no longer be operated by muscle memory; ie knobs vs touchscreen.
Many more distractions- Facebook, email, etc. on the screen.
Increased phone use.
Increased hostility,aggression / less concern for fellow citizens.
Poorer outward visibility due to thicker pillars, yes- but also dark window tinting.
Some other things to consider:
Cash for Clunkers
Occurred in 2009. Lighter, older vehicles, with better visibility went off the road and were replaced with heavier cars with worse visibility. Did other countries have similar programs? How does their vehicle age compare to the US. Can we correlate vehicle age to fatality risk?
Right Turn on Red
And similar traffic laws. Canada allows right turns on red but I don't think many European countries do. How many fatalities occur on right turns?
Road type mix
Can we compare fatality rates across country for similar roads? My prior is that more people in the US live on/near fast moving arterials than in Canada or Europe meaning they are more exposed to riskier roads.
Ped Infrastructure
There is also a question of how much pedestrian infrastructure is available at the location of the crash. Could the pedestrian have avoided being in/near the roadway if they even wanted to?
Public transit
If more public transit is available, maybe pedestrians will choose that over walking long distances or on riskier roads so they are less vulnerable. Would need to have a set of similar roads in different locations and compare their crash data and the public transit available.
Driver license requirements
How are they different between countries and states. How does that correlate with Fatality/crash rates.
Also:
Street light changes
Many cities are moving from Sodium lamps to LEDs. The LEDs give of a whiter/clearer light, but the light is more focused to decrease light pollution. The Sodium lamp light was very yellow/orange but lit a very large area. Hard to image this was enough but could play a role.
Vehicle Miles Travelled
Does VMT correlate with more crashes in a city? Are there areas this doesn't hold true?
I suggest examining the growth rate of e-bikes and determining if there is any correlation.
A few quick observations:
1. e-bikes are relatively fast - 20+ MPH. Most people lack experience handling bikes at that speed.
2. The lighting on the average e-bike is barely adequate, both for navigation at night and visibility to passing vehicles, both night and day.
3. Anecdotally, the adoption rate of e-bikes for cost-effective commuting, particularly within the Hispanic community, appears to be increasing rapidly.
4. Increasing numbers of children now have e-bikes, and, as a result of the greater mobility, are riding in locations they previously would have never ridden a conventional bike, much less walked.
It would be interesting to tease out e-bike vs non-e-bike deaths in the cyclist death stats (and separate legal from illegal e-bikes as well, since you mention 20+ mph—only class 3 bikes can legally go that fast) but that doesn't explain the main focus of the articles, which is pedestrians, unless they're all getting hit by e-bikes.
Thanks. My mistake. I assumed cyclists were included in the definition of pedestrians.
Ack! No-o-o-oo! We are *NOT* pedestrians!!
(I'm being deliberately a bit theatrical here, for dramatic effect.)
But we are vehicles and are supposed to obey vehicle laws and stay off the sidewalks.
I'd be interested to see
A) The relationship between dedicated bike lanes and cyclist deaths, and/or the availability of sidewalks for pedestrians. Do either play a role?
B) Do auto-braking anti collision systems do anything to mitigate these deaths? Might be too soon to tell.
Pedestrian deaths have moved to suburban areas.
We know that suburban areas have worse pedestrian infrastructure, wider roads, and there are less reasons for drivers to expect pedestrians in these places. We also know that these trends are worse in newer-built suburbs, rather than older streetcar suburbs, and that these types of suburbs are especially prevalent in the Sunbelt.
At the same time, we know that in the United States there has been a trend towards increased suburbanization for households with lower incomes than in past suburban waves, increased movement to the Sunbelt in general, and increasing inability for some suburbs to maintain their infrastructure later on in its capital cycle.
We can put these things we know to get to a composite explanation: pedestrian deaths are increasing because there are increasing numbers of people (including those who may not be able to own or maintain as many cars) in the landscapes that are most dangerous for pedestrians.