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 ;-)
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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'.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
One interesting aspect here is that you note that there are socio-economic factors indicating hotspots outside of downtown areas. I’m not sure how much growth in deaths we see in low SE suburbs v high SE suburbs but if it is a meaningful difference then it does at least suggest a behavioral component with the possibility of shifting cultural norms in populations. Many non-US born residents come from countries with staggeringly high RTA statistics like India. I know about this because when I was young one of my closest friends died in an RTA in India and that’s how we found out just how common it was.
In general I tend to ask “What has changed in inputs to explain the change in outputs” and at the same time “what is different about the US v. Canada, our closest comparison”. Once you draw that Venn Diagram the possible explanations get narrower and narrower. One thing we might do is develop hypotheses about each of these micro-areas and then try to find more granular comps in Canada (and in Europe if possible). That might help tease this all apart.
For example. Are there Canadian or European “hot spots” that mirror US growth in RTA pedestrian deaths and what can we learn about those?
Also. What is the pattern like in Low SE suburbs of Canadian cities?
The other thing that we might look it is any patterns in road design, parking spaces etc. In the UK there is a significant exclusion zone for parking near pedestrian crossings. That said I’m not sure that’s “changed” in the US so not a promising area.
As for the homeless component. There is no doubt that the increase in certain drugs among homeless leads them to wonder into traffic routinely. That has to be part of this. We could look and see if homeless have migrated more to suburban areas (this has certainly happened in my metro area). We also know that these drugs are more prevalent in the US than other places. A good candidate to be part of the story.
Watch some CharlieBo313 YT videos to see routine "pedestrian encroachment" on residential streets (especially at night) in Detroit, Michigan. Note as well that the oft-cited increase in phone usage occurs on both sides of the windshield...
Have you looked into the weight of all vehicles increasing? Could it be that even smaller US car models like a camry or civic weigh substantially more than they used to, even if their size hasn't increased? And if so, is this increase in weight specific to US cars? (I was discussing your first article about this with a friend, who told me that even those smaller models weigh about 1,000lb more than they did in the '90s . . . I haven't looked into sources for this myself though.)
It's a good point. But the physics od kinetic energy is Energy = Mass x Velocity². so double mass gives 2x Energy. go from 10 to 20mph 2x Energy. to 40mph is 4x energy.
Yes velocity has more of an impact, but even a 25% increase in mass may be enough to increase stopping distance and/or push an accident from injury to fatality.
Would be great to see a follow-up looking at proxies for police enforcement of traffic laws. Speed limits only matter if they are enforced and there’s some evidence reduced in person traffic enforcement has coincided with more pedestrian fatalities. This is hypothesized to be the result of increased reliance on speed cameras and other automated traffic enforcement as well as a general pullback of enforcement following controversies over policing (“Ferguson effect”).
I was also thinking about the drop in traffic enforcement, but anecdotally that is also true in Canada (where in Toronto it is a police union work-to-rule tactic, but in Montreal and Halifax is just sort of happening without a specific reason like that).
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your Pedestrians in Road graph means that 89% of excess deaths are “classified as jaywalking, failing to properly yield, or improperly in the road”. In 2010 this is 50% of deaths (2151 deaths) and in 2023 it’s 66% of deaths (4827) — which means 2676 excess deaths. (I converted the percentages in that chart into raw numbers by looking at your US Pedestrian Deaths chart, which shows pedestrian deaths increase from 4302 (in 2010, the first year that is also in the Pedestrians in Road chart) to 7314 (in 2023), which means 3012 excess deaths.) So 89% of the 3012 excess deaths are the 2676 excess deaths shown in Pedestrians in Road.
This doesn’t tell us what cofactors might help cause these deaths, but it does tell us that if we avoid jaywalking we’ll avoid these deaths.
I often jaywalk, and my wife is sometimes concerned. I take this post as a huge red flag that tells me I should stop jaywalking, especially at night, or after a drink, or if the situation is at all unclear.
More important, this seems like good advice for everyone.
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.
DOT is an EXTREMELY stodgy government agency.
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 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.
this is my hypothesis, combined with more phone use from drivers and peds
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
One interesting aspect here is that you note that there are socio-economic factors indicating hotspots outside of downtown areas. I’m not sure how much growth in deaths we see in low SE suburbs v high SE suburbs but if it is a meaningful difference then it does at least suggest a behavioral component with the possibility of shifting cultural norms in populations. Many non-US born residents come from countries with staggeringly high RTA statistics like India. I know about this because when I was young one of my closest friends died in an RTA in India and that’s how we found out just how common it was.
In general I tend to ask “What has changed in inputs to explain the change in outputs” and at the same time “what is different about the US v. Canada, our closest comparison”. Once you draw that Venn Diagram the possible explanations get narrower and narrower. One thing we might do is develop hypotheses about each of these micro-areas and then try to find more granular comps in Canada (and in Europe if possible). That might help tease this all apart.
For example. Are there Canadian or European “hot spots” that mirror US growth in RTA pedestrian deaths and what can we learn about those?
Also. What is the pattern like in Low SE suburbs of Canadian cities?
The other thing that we might look it is any patterns in road design, parking spaces etc. In the UK there is a significant exclusion zone for parking near pedestrian crossings. That said I’m not sure that’s “changed” in the US so not a promising area.
As for the homeless component. There is no doubt that the increase in certain drugs among homeless leads them to wonder into traffic routinely. That has to be part of this. We could look and see if homeless have migrated more to suburban areas (this has certainly happened in my metro area). We also know that these drugs are more prevalent in the US than other places. A good candidate to be part of the story.
One more thing.
There’s a strange parallel here between gun ownership and gun murders.
Canadians own a lot of guns but a fraction of the gun murders.
The Swiss are armed to the teeth. Some Cantons require you to own an assault rifle and know how to use it! Almost no gun murders.
Similar to my point above: this could be cultural. People stop caring about whether other people live or die.
The other thing we should look at is the rising tide of US cars with no number plate / no consequences / no prosecutions. Compare that to other areas?
Watch some CharlieBo313 YT videos to see routine "pedestrian encroachment" on residential streets (especially at night) in Detroit, Michigan. Note as well that the oft-cited increase in phone usage occurs on both sides of the windshield...
LED/Xenon lights? Better visibility makes people drive faster.
But the cone is limited to the middle and not helping for things coming from the side.
Increases in unlit suburban (low income) areas.
Doesn't lighting tend to be more widely used in low income areas than in others?
Have you looked into the weight of all vehicles increasing? Could it be that even smaller US car models like a camry or civic weigh substantially more than they used to, even if their size hasn't increased? And if so, is this increase in weight specific to US cars? (I was discussing your first article about this with a friend, who told me that even those smaller models weigh about 1,000lb more than they did in the '90s . . . I haven't looked into sources for this myself though.)
Yes all vehicle types have gotten heavier.
It's a good point. But the physics od kinetic energy is Energy = Mass x Velocity². so double mass gives 2x Energy. go from 10 to 20mph 2x Energy. to 40mph is 4x energy.
Yes velocity has more of an impact, but even a 25% increase in mass may be enough to increase stopping distance and/or push an accident from injury to fatality.
Would be great to see a follow-up looking at proxies for police enforcement of traffic laws. Speed limits only matter if they are enforced and there’s some evidence reduced in person traffic enforcement has coincided with more pedestrian fatalities. This is hypothesized to be the result of increased reliance on speed cameras and other automated traffic enforcement as well as a general pullback of enforcement following controversies over policing (“Ferguson effect”).
I was also thinking about the drop in traffic enforcement, but anecdotally that is also true in Canada (where in Toronto it is a police union work-to-rule tactic, but in Montreal and Halifax is just sort of happening without a specific reason like that).
Hi Brian,
Correct me if I'm wrong, but your Pedestrians in Road graph means that 89% of excess deaths are “classified as jaywalking, failing to properly yield, or improperly in the road”. In 2010 this is 50% of deaths (2151 deaths) and in 2023 it’s 66% of deaths (4827) — which means 2676 excess deaths. (I converted the percentages in that chart into raw numbers by looking at your US Pedestrian Deaths chart, which shows pedestrian deaths increase from 4302 (in 2010, the first year that is also in the Pedestrians in Road chart) to 7314 (in 2023), which means 3012 excess deaths.) So 89% of the 3012 excess deaths are the 2676 excess deaths shown in Pedestrians in Road.
This doesn’t tell us what cofactors might help cause these deaths, but it does tell us that if we avoid jaywalking we’ll avoid these deaths.
I often jaywalk, and my wife is sometimes concerned. I take this post as a huge red flag that tells me I should stop jaywalking, especially at night, or after a drink, or if the situation is at all unclear.
More important, this seems like good advice for everyone.