"In this study, we screened the entire US roadway network to identify fatal pedestrian crash “hot spot” corridors: 1,000-meter-long sections of roadway where six or more fatal pedestrian crashes occurred during an eightyear period. We identified 34 hot spot corridors during 2001-2008 and 31 during 2009-2016. While only five corridors were hot spots during both analysis periods, the 60 unique hot spots had remarkably consistent characteristics. Nearly all (97%) were multilane roadways, with 70% requiring pedestrians to cross five or more lanes. More than three-quarters had speed limits of 30 mph or higher, and 62% had traffic volumes exceeding 25,000 vehicles per day. All had adjacent commercial retail and service land uses, 72% had billboards, and three-quarters were bordered by low-income neighborhoods. Corridors with these characteristics clearly have the potential to produce high numbers of pedestrian fatalities. We also used hierarchical clustering to classify the hot spots based on their roadway and surrounding landuse characteristics into three types: regional highways, urban primary arterial roadways, and New York City thoroughfares. Each context may require different safety strategies. Our results support a systemic approach to improve pedestrian safety: Agencies should identify other roadway corridors with similar characteristics throughout the US and take actions to reduce the risk of future pedestrian fatalities." https://jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/1825
Hypothesis: All new vehicles (Trucks, SUVs and sedans) have poorer visibility and driver awareness due to crash safety regulations. Pillars are bigger and windows are smaller making driver situational awareness worse on newer cars. Does looking at pedestrian fatality rates versus vehicle age show any correlation?
This is my thought. Most newer cars I've driven in the last couple of years seem to have terrible sight lines. Fits with the higher mortality rate--driver never sees the pedestrian and thus doesn't slow down.
I often look through a car's cabin to see what's on the other side of the car. But the window height on cars is a lot shorter than it was 16 years ago, so it's harder to see through cars than it used to be.
Conversely - Pedestrian detection with Automatic Emergency Braking has become commonplace on even the base of base specs. From the list of "Deadliest Vehicles" from 2023 - they have ALL had PD-AEB since:
Chevy Silverado/GMC Sierra: 2022
F-150: 2021
Camry: 2018
Accord: 2018
Civic: 2019
Freightliner Cascadia(!?!?!?): 2018 for ABA5, 2021 for ABA6
Altima: 2019
Corolla: 2017
Explorer: 2020
Tacoma: 2018
Tahoe: 2022
RAM Pickup: 2025
Grand Cherokee: 2022
I would expect the fatality rates per Make/Model to decline not based on vehicle age, but I would expect significant improvements per Make/Model based on those kinds of cutoffs - e.g. in 2023, there was only 1 full MY of F-150 with PD-AEB, and while Camry jumped from 5th to 3rd on the list, we don't have clear data to divide the "Killer Kamrys" into Pre and Post MY 2018 and see whether there is the expected 'falling off a cliff' with the inclusion of PD-AEB on *every* Camry starting in 2018.
The fact that the number of children hit by cars is declining, despite the SUV craze, is not a surprise. Birth rates are down and the "don't let your child roam the neighborhood alone" moral panic is still going strong.
Did you catch Noah Smith’s bit on the topic of SUVs?
> For one thing, as John Burn-Murdoch points out, people in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have been going even more crazy for SUVs, and yet their pedestrian deaths have continued to go down (graph shown)
In NZ, at least, the SUV's are 'safer' for pedestrians than in the USA.
Our SUV's are mostly from Japan and Sth Korea. Also increasingly from China. These conform to stricter pedestrian safety regulations than the USA ones. They have design features such as lower and more sloped front ends, and pedestrian-friendly crumple zones comparison to USA SUV's.
A component of the answer is obvious in Tucson for example. Sadly, we have far more people walking aimlessly across the middle of the road without regard to traffic.
Literally walking right out into 4 lanes of city traffic.
Some, Sadly are homeless obviously. Some under the influence.
Another group of pedestrians are distracted walkers looking at their phones
You see pedestrians who have no interest or idea about their responsibility to yield, look for traffic. There is some implicit concept of pedestrian immunity from Physics.
Cities have dramatically more target opportunities for a pedestrian collision with a vehicle.
It's a question of density and "cross-section" probability.
Tucson is not pedestrian friendly. I'd attribute the high number of accidents to rising homelessness and poor civil engineering. A lack of sidewalks, even in residential areas, makes it difficult to travel without a car. Those without cars (walkers, runners, bikers) are forced to share the pavement/shoulder with box trucks and passenger vehicles whizzing by at 45mph. This lack of dedicated paths and physical barriers certainly has to play a role in the rise of accidents.
Ironically, the lack of sidewalks reduces the opportunity for socialization and outdoor exercise, forcing people to hop in their cars and drive to parks and paths to walk safely.
There are few places to cross multi-lane divided high traffic roads. If you want to know where pedestrians died attempting to cross, look for places the city installed pedestrian controlled stop lights and crosswalks along the major roads. They also installed additional street lighting in locations where pedestrians were struck at night.
Perhaps I wrote poorly. I did not want to say or imply, Tucson is Pedestrian friendly. I was pointing out where Pedestrians are overwhelmingly at fault.
There are in my view two stereotypes of bad Pedestrian and bikers as well.
a. the entitled walker and biker who blatantly are choosing to be irresponsible
b. the incapacitated on drugs, homeless, sad situations.
Tucson has built some dedicated walking areas. The general streets have sidewalks. There are many many Pedestrian enabled red light crossing areas. If you know Tucson, they are all over. Craycroft, 22nd many of them.
an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
"he had an accident at the factory"
Nothing in the definition implies that accidents are unavoidable, only unintentional. "Unavoidable accident" is actually an oxymoron - we don't use accident to describe things like getting hit by lightning which aren't the result of an unintended human action.
Even sedan design within the same model changed. Modern sedans are heavier cars with a flatter front and a taller bonnet than they used to have in the blob era of the late 90's and the aughts. That would make them deadlier to pedestrians. Powerful engines have become ubiquitous as well.
Newer Sedans ubiquitously have Pedestrian Detection with Automated Emergency Braking, however. The Big Ones (Camry/Accord/Civic/Corolla/Maxima/Altima) have all had PD+AEB since 2018, making them *significantly* less deadly to pedestrians.
Recently had to drive through an urban college campus. Was astounded by the shear number of student pedestrians walking across street and jaywalking. Watched two separate scooter pedestrians almost hit as they darted across - one tried to dart across as traffic flow changed and crashed to ground to avoid being struck- watched him
That would naturally cause an increase in all pedestrian collisions, but with a constant fatality rate. Instead we see a constant rate of collisions with an increasing fatality rate.
I almost hit a biker the other week when my light turned green. I just happened to accelerate slowly so the biker cleared the intersection before I hit him. I was in a compact car in the right-turn lane, and to my left was a large pickup truck completely blocking my view of the pedestrian crossing. The biker must've begun crossing just before the light turned green. It was a Michigan left intersection so the light either allows east-west traffic to cross or north-south; there are no other modes. He came into my view from around the truck a moment after the light turned green, and finished crossing about the time I realized he was there.
If the car to my left had stopped behind the stopping line as I had done and had been a sedan, I would've seen the biker and there would have been no risk. So despite my driving a sedan, a pickup truck was key to me coming closer to striking a biker than I have ever come.
Great data! I would advise talking to an urban planner. Street design is everything. Wider roads (that encourage speeding), especially roads owned by state DOT that cut through towns are extremely dangerous and difficult to redesign for bureaucratic reasons ("traffic flow" being the first and only priority"). Pair this with the increase in biking/walking in urban areas and there is center for conflict. Our street design process is in terrible need of a an overhaul and why complete street projects are showing success.
I also wonder about the accuracy of some of the data given the nature of these events. Are driver claims of “not distracted” verified by phone data (and of course there are other sources of distraction as well).
But as a fellow planner (who usually travels on foot or by bike) I second your complete streets message. From my vantage point, aggressive driving seems to have become much worse over the last few years, and traffic enforcement seems to have fallen substantially.
I'd wager the data on speeding in accidents, particularly fatal ones, is just as spotty as the data on "distracted driving" due to the "only getting the driver's side of the story" problem, and is probably the most likely candidate for explaining the increase in sedan fatalities. One shouldn't expect a driver to answer questions about their own culpability truthfully after they've killed someone.
As Sam Penrose's comment points out, road design in the USA also contributes to the problem in a big way relative to other countries. We have bigger roads, where more people are comfortable going fast, with a wider field of view for a driver to take in, that are riskier for a pedestrian to cross. I think speeding is a literal force multiplier on "distracted driving" in two ways: decreased time to react, and an increase in the physical force of the collision.
Yeah, this was my thought as well. Speed at the time of a crash is very hard to determine. As is illustrated in the speed versus fatality charts that are often published by safe streets organizations, an increase in a rate of pedestrian fatalities isn't merely linear with an increase in vehicle speed. That rate is further increased by vehicle size, but above about 40 mph, you're pretty much killing any pedestrian regardless of vehicle type. So size matters, particularly in urban cores, but it matters less on high speed stroads. I think Brian's intuition that city data would be more revealing is a good one.
Anecdotally, most of my close calls as a pedestrian in a moderately dense city have been crossing commuter-heavy arterials that connect with freeways. There seems to be a freeway mentality (high speed, entitlement to "flow", unawareness of peripheral activity) that persists well beyond the exit ramp.
I agree, the best explanation for why both SUV and sedan crashes are more fatal for pedestrians (if you believe that non-fatal crashes are accurately reported), is that the cars are driving faster at the time of impact. The data that reports whether a car was speeding in a collision is very hard to believe. For example, South Carolina reports that only 0.3% of pedestrian collisions feature a speeding car, which is absurdly low, while in California the percentage is 47.4. This appears to be garbage in garbage out.
So the question then is: why are cars traveling faster at the time of impact? There could be a variety of explanations which have been raised in the comments, among them that the urban roads where crashes occur have changed perhaps to allow greater speeds, drivers are more distracted, pedestrians are more distracted and/or cavalier about crossing these dangerous roads, or perhaps a more cultural/social phenomenon leading to more tiredness, anger and exasperation amongst drivers leading to faster and more dangerous driving. I'm not sure what the catalyst will be but it would of course be possible to fix these issues through urban planning and laws but I'm not optimistic we have the collective and coordinated will to do it on a national level. There are certainly examples of cities that have taken steps to reduce pedestrian deaths. And the Netherlands went from nearly as dangerous for pedestrians as the US to dramatically safer, so it can be done.
As a standalone, this is disproven in the same way manner as cell phone use (there would be higher non-death collisions), but since 2009 nearly every new car has a built-in tablet as the console in lieu of physical buttons. It might not seem like distracted driving when you are messing with the temperature or radio on your massive touchscreen console because you are just operating your vehicle the way the vehicle is set up to be operated. But really is that not just another big cell phone to be distracted by? I believe there have been a few studies on this topic which prove a link between distraction and big touchscreen consoles. Maybe it’s both bigger, heavier vehicles *and* distractive driving baked into the vehicle’s operation. Seems like a dangerous combo to me
The fact that touch screens require vision to interact with, rather than being able to operate by touch the way you can with physical buttons, is under-appreciated by users.
I read Subaru is going back to knobs and buttons for some functions. Where I live sometimes we leave gloves on for short hops. Gloves and touch screens don't work.
I also concur with the reduced enforcement. But the missing factor is exposure in terms of pedestrian activity. Are more people walking? I think so and I noticed a definite increase in the COVID period.
Would be interesting to see stats on medical treatment. How many are dead at the accident scene vs die after/while being transported to the hospital. Has wait time for the ambulance increased. Has travel time to the hospital increased. Has wait time for medical care increased?
In Nashville I notice a ton of people in the Right of Way (selling homeless newspapers, pan handling, etc.) I wonder if normalizing pedestrians entering ROW is having an impact
"In this study, we screened the entire US roadway network to identify fatal pedestrian crash “hot spot” corridors: 1,000-meter-long sections of roadway where six or more fatal pedestrian crashes occurred during an eightyear period. We identified 34 hot spot corridors during 2001-2008 and 31 during 2009-2016. While only five corridors were hot spots during both analysis periods, the 60 unique hot spots had remarkably consistent characteristics. Nearly all (97%) were multilane roadways, with 70% requiring pedestrians to cross five or more lanes. More than three-quarters had speed limits of 30 mph or higher, and 62% had traffic volumes exceeding 25,000 vehicles per day. All had adjacent commercial retail and service land uses, 72% had billboards, and three-quarters were bordered by low-income neighborhoods. Corridors with these characteristics clearly have the potential to produce high numbers of pedestrian fatalities. We also used hierarchical clustering to classify the hot spots based on their roadway and surrounding landuse characteristics into three types: regional highways, urban primary arterial roadways, and New York City thoroughfares. Each context may require different safety strategies. Our results support a systemic approach to improve pedestrian safety: Agencies should identify other roadway corridors with similar characteristics throughout the US and take actions to reduce the risk of future pedestrian fatalities." https://jtlu.org/index.php/jtlu/article/view/1825
Hypothesis: All new vehicles (Trucks, SUVs and sedans) have poorer visibility and driver awareness due to crash safety regulations. Pillars are bigger and windows are smaller making driver situational awareness worse on newer cars. Does looking at pedestrian fatality rates versus vehicle age show any correlation?
This may be part of it, there's a paper released a while ago that as I recall points to reduced visability in all types of recent cars.
This is my thought. Most newer cars I've driven in the last couple of years seem to have terrible sight lines. Fits with the higher mortality rate--driver never sees the pedestrian and thus doesn't slow down.
I often look through a car's cabin to see what's on the other side of the car. But the window height on cars is a lot shorter than it was 16 years ago, so it's harder to see through cars than it used to be.
Conversely - Pedestrian detection with Automatic Emergency Braking has become commonplace on even the base of base specs. From the list of "Deadliest Vehicles" from 2023 - they have ALL had PD-AEB since:
Chevy Silverado/GMC Sierra: 2022
F-150: 2021
Camry: 2018
Accord: 2018
Civic: 2019
Freightliner Cascadia(!?!?!?): 2018 for ABA5, 2021 for ABA6
Altima: 2019
Corolla: 2017
Explorer: 2020
Tacoma: 2018
Tahoe: 2022
RAM Pickup: 2025
Grand Cherokee: 2022
I would expect the fatality rates per Make/Model to decline not based on vehicle age, but I would expect significant improvements per Make/Model based on those kinds of cutoffs - e.g. in 2023, there was only 1 full MY of F-150 with PD-AEB, and while Camry jumped from 5th to 3rd on the list, we don't have clear data to divide the "Killer Kamrys" into Pre and Post MY 2018 and see whether there is the expected 'falling off a cliff' with the inclusion of PD-AEB on *every* Camry starting in 2018.
The fact that the number of children hit by cars is declining, despite the SUV craze, is not a surprise. Birth rates are down and the "don't let your child roam the neighborhood alone" moral panic is still going strong.
Did you catch Noah Smith’s bit on the topic of SUVs?
> For one thing, as John Burn-Murdoch points out, people in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have been going even more crazy for SUVs, and yet their pedestrian deaths have continued to go down (graph shown)
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/at-least-five-interesting-things-9c6
I missed this, thanks!
In NZ, at least, the SUV's are 'safer' for pedestrians than in the USA.
Our SUV's are mostly from Japan and Sth Korea. Also increasingly from China. These conform to stricter pedestrian safety regulations than the USA ones. They have design features such as lower and more sloped front ends, and pedestrian-friendly crumple zones comparison to USA SUV's.
A component of the answer is obvious in Tucson for example. Sadly, we have far more people walking aimlessly across the middle of the road without regard to traffic.
Literally walking right out into 4 lanes of city traffic.
Some, Sadly are homeless obviously. Some under the influence.
Another group of pedestrians are distracted walkers looking at their phones
You see pedestrians who have no interest or idea about their responsibility to yield, look for traffic. There is some implicit concept of pedestrian immunity from Physics.
Cities have dramatically more target opportunities for a pedestrian collision with a vehicle.
It's a question of density and "cross-section" probability.
Tucson is not pedestrian friendly. I'd attribute the high number of accidents to rising homelessness and poor civil engineering. A lack of sidewalks, even in residential areas, makes it difficult to travel without a car. Those without cars (walkers, runners, bikers) are forced to share the pavement/shoulder with box trucks and passenger vehicles whizzing by at 45mph. This lack of dedicated paths and physical barriers certainly has to play a role in the rise of accidents.
Ironically, the lack of sidewalks reduces the opportunity for socialization and outdoor exercise, forcing people to hop in their cars and drive to parks and paths to walk safely.
There are few places to cross multi-lane divided high traffic roads. If you want to know where pedestrians died attempting to cross, look for places the city installed pedestrian controlled stop lights and crosswalks along the major roads. They also installed additional street lighting in locations where pedestrians were struck at night.
Perhaps I wrote poorly. I did not want to say or imply, Tucson is Pedestrian friendly. I was pointing out where Pedestrians are overwhelmingly at fault.
There are in my view two stereotypes of bad Pedestrian and bikers as well.
a. the entitled walker and biker who blatantly are choosing to be irresponsible
b. the incapacitated on drugs, homeless, sad situations.
Tucson has built some dedicated walking areas. The general streets have sidewalks. There are many many Pedestrian enabled red light crossing areas. If you know Tucson, they are all over. Craycroft, 22nd many of them.
In UK we try to 'collisions' rather than 'accidents' to emphasize their avoidable nature.
US city planners like me generally say “crashes” for a similar reason.
In NZ this change of description was implemented in the late 1980's.
I hear this so often, but it's wrong!
noun
1.
an unfortunate incident that happens unexpectedly and unintentionally, typically resulting in damage or injury.
"he had an accident at the factory"
Nothing in the definition implies that accidents are unavoidable, only unintentional. "Unavoidable accident" is actually an oxymoron - we don't use accident to describe things like getting hit by lightning which aren't the result of an unintended human action.
Maybe ... but every 'accident' I've been involved in could have been avoided with better anticipation ... better driving.
If you're already a perfect driver and find yourself unexpectedly and unintentionally driving over a pedestrian then that is an accident
Even sedan design within the same model changed. Modern sedans are heavier cars with a flatter front and a taller bonnet than they used to have in the blob era of the late 90's and the aughts. That would make them deadlier to pedestrians. Powerful engines have become ubiquitous as well.
Newer Sedans ubiquitously have Pedestrian Detection with Automated Emergency Braking, however. The Big Ones (Camry/Accord/Civic/Corolla/Maxima/Altima) have all had PD+AEB since 2018, making them *significantly* less deadly to pedestrians.
Recently had to drive through an urban college campus. Was astounded by the shear number of student pedestrians walking across street and jaywalking. Watched two separate scooter pedestrians almost hit as they darted across - one tried to dart across as traffic flow changed and crashed to ground to avoid being struck- watched him
limp away.
What about distracted pedestrians? Pedestrians walking while on the phone especially.
That would naturally cause an increase in all pedestrian collisions, but with a constant fatality rate. Instead we see a constant rate of collisions with an increasing fatality rate.
We see a constant rate of /reported/ collisions. It's possible the proportion of reporting for low-severity pedestrian collisions has decreased.
I almost hit a biker the other week when my light turned green. I just happened to accelerate slowly so the biker cleared the intersection before I hit him. I was in a compact car in the right-turn lane, and to my left was a large pickup truck completely blocking my view of the pedestrian crossing. The biker must've begun crossing just before the light turned green. It was a Michigan left intersection so the light either allows east-west traffic to cross or north-south; there are no other modes. He came into my view from around the truck a moment after the light turned green, and finished crossing about the time I realized he was there.
If the car to my left had stopped behind the stopping line as I had done and had been a sedan, I would've seen the biker and there would have been no risk. So despite my driving a sedan, a pickup truck was key to me coming closer to striking a biker than I have ever come.
Yep, I use a small vehicle and I agree that large vehicles totally block sight lines so it is both harder for me to see other cars and pedestrians.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data', however.
Great data! I would advise talking to an urban planner. Street design is everything. Wider roads (that encourage speeding), especially roads owned by state DOT that cut through towns are extremely dangerous and difficult to redesign for bureaucratic reasons ("traffic flow" being the first and only priority"). Pair this with the increase in biking/walking in urban areas and there is center for conflict. Our street design process is in terrible need of a an overhaul and why complete street projects are showing success.
I don't think street design would be able to explain the sudden jump since 2009.
I also wonder about the accuracy of some of the data given the nature of these events. Are driver claims of “not distracted” verified by phone data (and of course there are other sources of distraction as well).
But as a fellow planner (who usually travels on foot or by bike) I second your complete streets message. From my vantage point, aggressive driving seems to have become much worse over the last few years, and traffic enforcement seems to have fallen substantially.
So,low/non traffic enforcement isn't just a problem in CA.
I'd wager the data on speeding in accidents, particularly fatal ones, is just as spotty as the data on "distracted driving" due to the "only getting the driver's side of the story" problem, and is probably the most likely candidate for explaining the increase in sedan fatalities. One shouldn't expect a driver to answer questions about their own culpability truthfully after they've killed someone.
https://wjes.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13017-021-00395-8
As Sam Penrose's comment points out, road design in the USA also contributes to the problem in a big way relative to other countries. We have bigger roads, where more people are comfortable going fast, with a wider field of view for a driver to take in, that are riskier for a pedestrian to cross. I think speeding is a literal force multiplier on "distracted driving" in two ways: decreased time to react, and an increase in the physical force of the collision.
Yeah, this was my thought as well. Speed at the time of a crash is very hard to determine. As is illustrated in the speed versus fatality charts that are often published by safe streets organizations, an increase in a rate of pedestrian fatalities isn't merely linear with an increase in vehicle speed. That rate is further increased by vehicle size, but above about 40 mph, you're pretty much killing any pedestrian regardless of vehicle type. So size matters, particularly in urban cores, but it matters less on high speed stroads. I think Brian's intuition that city data would be more revealing is a good one.
Anecdotally, most of my close calls as a pedestrian in a moderately dense city have been crossing commuter-heavy arterials that connect with freeways. There seems to be a freeway mentality (high speed, entitlement to "flow", unawareness of peripheral activity) that persists well beyond the exit ramp.
I agree, the best explanation for why both SUV and sedan crashes are more fatal for pedestrians (if you believe that non-fatal crashes are accurately reported), is that the cars are driving faster at the time of impact. The data that reports whether a car was speeding in a collision is very hard to believe. For example, South Carolina reports that only 0.3% of pedestrian collisions feature a speeding car, which is absurdly low, while in California the percentage is 47.4. This appears to be garbage in garbage out.
So the question then is: why are cars traveling faster at the time of impact? There could be a variety of explanations which have been raised in the comments, among them that the urban roads where crashes occur have changed perhaps to allow greater speeds, drivers are more distracted, pedestrians are more distracted and/or cavalier about crossing these dangerous roads, or perhaps a more cultural/social phenomenon leading to more tiredness, anger and exasperation amongst drivers leading to faster and more dangerous driving. I'm not sure what the catalyst will be but it would of course be possible to fix these issues through urban planning and laws but I'm not optimistic we have the collective and coordinated will to do it on a national level. There are certainly examples of cities that have taken steps to reduce pedestrian deaths. And the Netherlands went from nearly as dangerous for pedestrians as the US to dramatically safer, so it can be done.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-26/u-s-lessons-from-the-dutch-traffic-safety-revolution?sref=0GWD5mBc
As a standalone, this is disproven in the same way manner as cell phone use (there would be higher non-death collisions), but since 2009 nearly every new car has a built-in tablet as the console in lieu of physical buttons. It might not seem like distracted driving when you are messing with the temperature or radio on your massive touchscreen console because you are just operating your vehicle the way the vehicle is set up to be operated. But really is that not just another big cell phone to be distracted by? I believe there have been a few studies on this topic which prove a link between distraction and big touchscreen consoles. Maybe it’s both bigger, heavier vehicles *and* distractive driving baked into the vehicle’s operation. Seems like a dangerous combo to me
The fact that touch screens require vision to interact with, rather than being able to operate by touch the way you can with physical buttons, is under-appreciated by users.
I read Subaru is going back to knobs and buttons for some functions. Where I live sometimes we leave gloves on for short hops. Gloves and touch screens don't work.
Since there is VIN data on the crashes someone could figure out if newer tablet-equipped cars are disproportionately involved.
I also concur with the reduced enforcement. But the missing factor is exposure in terms of pedestrian activity. Are more people walking? I think so and I noticed a definite increase in the COVID period.
Would be interesting to see stats on medical treatment. How many are dead at the accident scene vs die after/while being transported to the hospital. Has wait time for the ambulance increased. Has travel time to the hospital increased. Has wait time for medical care increased?
In Nashville I notice a ton of people in the Right of Way (selling homeless newspapers, pan handling, etc.) I wonder if normalizing pedestrians entering ROW is having an impact
Great read as always. Heavy topic to cover.