GHSA previously issued a report finding that 3,434 pedestrians were killed on U.S. roadways in the first half of 2022, based on preliminary data reported by State Highway Safety Offices. A second report analyzing state-reported data for all of 2022 found that roadways continue to be incredibly deadly for pedestrians. There were 2.37 pedestrian deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 2022, up yet again and continuing a troubling trend of elevated rates that began in 2020.
The report also includes an analysis of 2021 data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System to provide additional context on when, where and how drivers strike and kill people on foot. This analysis uncovered a shocking safety disparity for people walking: Pedestrian deaths rose a troubling 77% between 2010 and 2021, compared to a 25% rise in all other traffic fatalities. The data analysis was conducted by Elizabeth Petraglia, Ph.D., of research firm Westat.
To combat this pedestrian safety crisis, GHSA supports a comprehensive solution based on the Safe System approach outlined in the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Roadway Safety Strategy (NRSS). Each of the five elements of this approach – safe road users, safe vehicles, safe speeds, safe roads and post-crash care – contribute in different but overlapping ways to provide a multi-layered safety net that can protect people on foot as well as other road users. The report includes examples of how states are utilizing Safe System principles to improve pedestrian safety.
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This timeframe also coincides with smartphones becoming ubiquitous. I’d be shocked if that isn’t also a factor.
There’s nothing more dangerous than someone in a vehicle too big for the road AND driving distracted. They might as well be firing off a machine gun into a crowd of people.
Honestly I wouldnt be surprised if half the problem was the digital infotainment (hate that word) system. When I want to mess with the air I look at it for .25 seconds and adjust it, meanwhile some people have to use what amounts to a slow clunky nockoff I pad to change the air, or radio, or navigation. Seriously those fucking systems need to be outlawed.
I’m sure that could be true. I haven’t witnessed people being inattentive while messing around with their radio/air con, but I have seen plenty of people on their phones while driving. You can spot them easily because they are still stopped when the light turns green, and then when they finally go they are phantom breaking for a few hundred meters!!!
Some states don’t even have laws to dissuade their use.
Really?
Yep, some are also only while the vehicle is in motion. So feel free to watch a video at a stopsign or set of lights.
Absolutely
Do you think it’s more cuz of drivers on their phones, pedestrians on their phone or equal parts both?
Drivers, even extremely alert pedestrians can’t dodge two tonns of steel moving at 110.
Exactly. The responsibility lies with the person in control of the vehicle, if for no other reason than they are surrounded by a metal cage and will suffer little in a crash with a pedestrian.
Most collisions with pedestrians usually happen in cities where there are no cars driving at 110kph. For 99% of cases this can be avoided by paying attention to your surroundings. This applies to both drivers and pedestrians. I “save” the life of several people a year by not driving over them when they just blindly step on the road apparently assuming what ever moves there is going to always see them and stop. For the vast majority of time this is the case but then there’s an exception an now you’re dead.
In general people crossing the road can be divided into three groups. Group A looks both ways before crossing so that they don’t get hit by a car. Group B looks after they’ve already stepped on the road to see what kind of car they’re getting hit by and group C doesn’t even care and just stares forward.
I get hit by cars about once a year. I look both ways, and I don’t J-walk.
My issue is that drivers don’t look both ways. I’m nearly 2m tall, so it’s not like I’m hard to see. I’ve mostly been assaulted through vehicular negligence while crossing near one-way streets, from people turning right on red, and people turning left on 4 lane roads. If someone is coming from behind me at 50 or 60 kph and I am 15 meters into crossing a street, there’s absolutely no way that I would’ve been able to see them prior to me being in their path.
For me, the most dangerous spots as a pedestrian are when you’re walking along a busy road, facing traffic, and you need to cross a minor street or a parking lot outlet. Drivers coming out of those will usually start pulling forward without looking my direction even a single time. It doesn’t matter that they’re stopped. They could start moving at any time if they see an opening in the traffic to make their turn. I’ve nearly been run over a few times because of that.
Drivers on their phones are more responsible for avoiding pedestrians than pedestrians are for trying to avoid vehicles since vehicles are large and deadly and supposedly require a license to drive. In addition to that, a pedestrian on a phone will be moving relatively slow compared to a distracted driver, and it is far easier to avoid hitting a pedestrian than it is to avoid getting run over by a car moving at an unsafe speed.
Drivers are always at fault unless a pedestrian leaps in front of them intentionally or the sidewalk is close enough to traffic that tripping and falling would end up in the path of a vehicle. The latter would be the fault of the street design if an attentive driver hit a pedestrian.
I think pedestrians on their phones doesn’t help, but a far larger portion would be distracted drivers. As others have stated, it’s far easier to avoid hitting a pedestrian then it is to avoid being hit by a driver.
Drivers.
What timeframe? From 2019 to current? That feels really late for “smartphones becoming ubiquitous”.
That’s a zero, not a nine.
Multiple ranges are shown, which is why I was asking for clarification. I thought we might be looking at the recent upward trend since 2019 as shown in the graphs.
Not just that but people just do not fucking care anymore. I have to walk into lots of large stores for my job and it’s almost every lot some asshole has to speed through so they don’t have to wait for somebody walking into the store. Even had some asshole run their car up right next to me then stop just before hitting me and when I stopped he was just smiling at me. Fuckers like that belong in jail threatening people with a vehicle.
Also, absolutely awful public spaces that make it dangerous to be a pedestrian. I’ve been living in Barcelona for the past few months and it’s fucking amazing over here by comparison to Canada & the US.
One of the reasons is probably the same why Tesla isn’t releasing their Cybertruck outside of the us - the Crash-Tests there just don’t factor in pedestrian survival rates if they are hit by the car that you want to release on the market. Most of those giant trucks don’t make it here because they’d just run over any pedestrian they hit without them having any chance of survival even at low speeds.
Add to that the totally car-centered infrastructure that basically punishes everyone not in a car and you have the perfect storm for dead pedestrians and bikers…
Something I’ve thought about recently that I don’t think gets mentioned enough is the raising of speed limits across the board. You have a car centric infrastructure operating along neglected (and sometimes non-existent) pedestrian paths and the speed limits keep going higher.
Long way of saying “Nobody outside the US has the right combination of gullibility and unfathomably poor taste to buy such a ghastly monstrosity” 😂
Oh I’m sure there are. I see more and more idiots with big American trucks here in the Netherlands. They completely don’t fit in our cities designed for normal sized cars. I also don’t see how they’re considered safe. The top of their hood is so high that you’ll mostly get hit by the grill on the front upon impact.
I also doubt most of those people really need one, they seem more like the type of people that compensate away their insecurities by having a big truck. I can sort of see a farmer or something using one, but in a city I don’t understand it. I guess they’re not banned because that’d upset the US or something.
That plus gas is more expensive in other countries, it’s hard to justify buying something that’s going to get 20 MPG at best.
A properly modified Jeep Patriot (2010-2014 models, I dunno about the others) can easily get 35mpg city/ 50mpg highway. You do have to keep the car clean, and make sure the tach stays between 1000-2000 at all times, but with the CVT the second part is easy.
You have to replace the air, and fuel filters with good filters, I used K&N. You also have to replace the spark plugs and plug wires with some “mid grade” plugs and wires. I also gave the thing a K&N oil filter, but I don’t think that’s necessary.
No doubt but I see mostly F150s and similar around here.
For the F150:
“The standard 3.3-liter V6 engine gets up to 20mpg city and 24 highway MPG, and the optional, more powerful 5.0L V8 engine gets up to 17 MPG in the city and 24 highway miles per gallon.”
That’s a tough sell when you’re paying $4-5 a gallon in Europe.
I think that the new blindingly bright headlights play a large part in the massive upswing in nighttime deaths. I have pretty much given up driving at night. Practically every vehicle coming the other way blinds me for at least 20 seconds. I was driving purely by watching the outer lane marker on the ground to my right. It’s just too dangerous to continue. Don’t even get me started on the morons in lifted trucks that get 10 ft behind you and blast all 3 mirrors until you can somehow, without being able to see, get out of their way.
My recommendation in the dangerous situation when
you’reyour visibility is being affected by people blasting you with light from behind is to slow down until the danger is over.Not only is slowing down if visibility falls a correct reaction from a safety point of view, by an “amazing coincidence” it’s the very opposite of what the morons are trying to force you to do.
Just pull over instead. (If possible)
When you’re in the middle of overtaking another car and somebody comes behind you too close and blinds you with their lights, THE most dangerous thing you could possibly do is rush the overtake and pull-over, because your ability to check the position of the car you’re overtaking using your side mirrors is compromised (either because you’re blinded by the lights behind you or might get blinded at a crutial moment if the car behind you flashes their highbeams at the wrong time) so changing lanes in that situation is the very opposite of what you should be doing.
Getting close to the tail of somebody on the highway and flashing high beams trying to pressure that person to move out of the lane is incredibly selfish thing to do because it activelly pushes the other person to endanger themselves, their passengers and even those on the other lane, and to add insult to injury that method of “pressure” requires breaking 2 traffic rules - safe distance from the car ahead and the use of high beams when it might blind another driver. Even in a situation were you’re blinded because the lights of the vehicle behind are too high, they’re still committing at least one traffic infraction: either they have not adjusted the aim of their lights to the legally mandated distance or they’re not maintaining a safe distance from you.
Further, slowing down and only changing lanes when you feel it’s safe to do so are exactly how as per the traffic rules you should deal with lower visibiility conditions.
I can understand the impulse to get out of the way, but you’re actually endangering yourself and others if you do so when your visibility is compromised.
Absolutelly, you’re overtaking slowly and you notice far behind a car fast approaching you and it’s the nice thing to do to go a bit faster and finish the overtake. However if they are excessivelly close and start imparing your visibility with their lights, safety comes first and that actually means slowing down and pulling over only when its again safe to do so.
I said if possible. No need to write paragraphs
You drive within “possible” if you’re on a race-track. On a road you’re supposed to drive within “safe”.
But why would pedestrian deaths go up if they’re being more illuminated?
—-
Edit: digging in further, increased homelessness is also called out as a possible reason. I know in my area there are a LOT more unhoused people wandering around at night and sleeping on very dangerous stroads.
Because other drivers are blinded…
You shouldn’t automatically get the right to drive SUVs just because you have a license.
Require anything built on a truck frame to require a commercial license or a rural address.
90% of rural addresses these days are just suburbs for people who want to pretend to be cowboys.
But but but how are all those people going to compensate otherwise?
I remember when the ol’ Honda Fit marketing material list “pedestrian safety” as an actual feature. Cars these days are complete opposite, they’ll turn pedestrian into mincemeat.
Now they’re “pedestrian proof”.
The callout for homelessness is not one I expected to see. Half of Hawaii’s deaths pedestrian are of homeless people.
That’s gotta be true just about everywhere, every city anyway.
This video here explains one of the issues one minute in as to why pedestrian deaths are rising. Definitely worth a watch.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh4H9qZ-_6Y&t=55
The way car companies are working around this legislation is why it’s so hard to find and buy smaller sized cars even if there is demand (think smart car size). It also makes our community’s less safe for pedestrian traffic and less enjoyable to walk.
and less enjoyable to walk.
Which, incidentally, is great for car manufacturers!
Worth a watch as well
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=Fh4H9qZ-_6Y&t=55
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
I think this is bs. I think that the advent of smart phones and distracted drivers plays a much bigger role. 2010 is around the time the smart phone became mainstream. People are paying less attention to the road as a result. I get that getting hit by a bigger car is worse, but when the driver isn’t paying attention in the first place, that’s the true danger. I’ve seen a ton of near misses from people texting and driving. My wife got in an accident because she was texting and driving. She lucked out and was found not at fault because the other person ran a stop sign, but had she not been texting, and actually watching the road, she likely would’ve seen it and stopped. Imo texting and driving ticket needs to be as bad if not worse than DUI. I’ve seen idiots driving around phone in hand making tik toks dancing while driving. Pay attention to the road, you’re in a death machine.
Except you can’t breathalyze somebody for smartphone use. So its just another impossible task of policing it. Maybe we should be designing our cities so pedestrian traffic does not cross travel lanes as often and close streets prone to such accidents to route stop and go traffic around pedestrian heavy areas
If this is the case, then why hasnt the rest of the world seen a similarly startling increase in pedestrian fatalities?
The rise in smartphones was a global phenomenon. By your logic, the entire world should be seeing similar rises in pedestrian fatalities, but they arent.
On the other hand, the rapid increase in vehicle size/weight has been fairly localized to the US due to regulations that incentivized such…
U got a source for that? It seems like it would be increasing globally in my opinion. That would certainly lend credence to the SUV theory if true.
Here is Ny times analysis of it… https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedestrians-cyclists.html
I saw it for a split second. DAMN YOU PAYWALL
Why not both?
Both can definitely be true, but I think people on their phone are causing way more pedestrian deaths.
But we’re not sub-selecting here. A death from distraction by a phone is as bad as a death from impatiently running a red or tailgating in an SUV.
I personally think larger cars are at fault more as I see more of them tailgating to push drivers to go faster - I’m big, get out of my way - but like you, that’s an impression from driving without data to back it up (albeit 40+ years of driving over 3 continents)
Wait, how did it go UP in 2020? Do you guys remember 2020? How could you possibly get run over by a car in 2020? Did the twelve people who still got to drive to places try extra hard? What the hell?
Plenty of blue collar workers didn’t get the “luxury” of staying home. I think the only time I was staying home was for a few weeks as a temporary layoff cause there wasn’t enough work to do, not because of any kind of safeguarding.
Combine that with people generally being a lot more lax with regards to following traffic laws and pedestrians who are expecting cars less, you’ve got a recipe for distatser.
Yeah, I remember 2020 – the 5 weeks I got off were glorious. That’ll never happen again.
Empty roads = no traffic = idiot drivers driving extra fast and careless
So the context is that roads in the U.S are generally designed for speeds way higher than what the speed limit is, and what the average speed with regular traffic volumes is. The pandemic removed a lot of this traffic, which was the primary impediment to drivers driving the design speed of the roads. This higher speed then led to the increased pedestrian fatalities.
Yes, they did. I had to be on the roads a bit at the height of the pandemic due to my job. Far fewer people were driving, but basically all of them were driving like absolute raving lunatics. People were acting under the assumption that cops wouldn’t be out (which was probably true, on average) so therefore laws just didn’t exist anymore.
I also notice that a highly visible subset of drivers have continued to behave this way even after the return to “normal.” They’re usually identifiable by the ownership of a Nissan Altima with haphazardly applied window tint, often spotted squeezing up the shoulder to run a red light into traffic without bothering to look first.
That or a Dodge Ram
I worked through COVID and drove a lot - I was a custom integrator (yeah…that was deemed “essential”) stopping at 1-4 homes per day. I’m less surprised by there being enough vehicles to kill with than there being enough pedestrians to hit. Seeing more than one or two people on the way to a client’s house was rare
Driving downtown from the office took 12 minutes. For context, it was usually a 45-60 minute ride. Barely anyone was on the road and I never had issues parking
That does seem very suspect. Maybe it’s adjusted for miles driven? Even though less driving happened, per mile driven the rate still increased.
Keep making 65 lane stroads with wider lanes and place pedestrians in the last place of priority. It’s bound to help.
What the hell is going on in Arizona and New Mexico? They have much higher rates of pedestrian fatalities than adjoining states.
I live in Arizona. It’s a combination of factors. For one, we have a higher than usual homeless population compared to other places, mainly due to the climate. Yeah you can die from heat exposure, but it’s a lot easier to mitigate than freezing to death.
Then there’s our roads- wide streets without much traffic means people drive a lot faster, crosswalks are few and far between, shitty public transportation so anyone who has to walk has to walk a long way and/or cross unsafely, basically with very few exceptions the only people walking are people who have no other choice, so drivers don’t look for pedestrians before crossing their paths.
To top that all off (or possibly just a further result of the demographics of pedestrians) there are not a whole lot of legal repercussions when a pedestrian is killed- if they were not in a crosswalk, or crossed against the light (which is sometimes necessary because the button that gives you a walk signal is broken) it’s pretty much accepted to be the pedestrian’s fault.
Remember when the self-driving Uber killed a pedestrian here years ago? First thing the news did was say she was a cyclist, because everyone hates us. She was walking her bicycle by the way. Then they said she was jaywalking. Thing is, I know the place where she got hit- it wasn’t marked as a crosswalk, but it was in line with paved walking paths on either side of the street, which legally makes it a de-facto crosswalk, so a pedestrian would have right of way. The city soon after put up signs on those paths saying not to cross there, and then years later tore out the paved paths and replaced with vegetation. Problem solved. Of course once they said she was homeless, the story pretty much disappeared. I think only one news outlet (at the time) actually looked into the police report and found that the person sitting in the car, whose job was to be ready to take over in case the self-driving software fucked up, had been watching YouTube videos on her phone. I don’t think she was ever held responsible, I haven’t looked into it in a long time so I could be wrong - but I doubt it.
So, Arizona kills more pedestrians because Arizona law enforcement effectively authorizes the killing of pedestrians. Got it.
A large factor is probably the increase of phone use. I’ve walked into a lot of shit looking at my phone.
A large factor is probably the increase of phone use. I’ve driven into a lot of shit looking at my phone.
A large factor is probably the increase of phone use. I’ve flown into a lot of shit looking at my phone.
A large factor is probably the increase of phone use. I’ve sailed into a lot of shit looking at my phone.
Also I think a large factor is phone use. I’ve walked into a lot of posts with one
This seems to match another trend that I feel like I’ve been seeing (though no real evidence). I know as we get older everything always seems to get worse, more expensive, shorter, etc. Though I genuinely feel like a lot of drivers are getting worse. I imagine it’s due to an increase of instant gratification and heightened sense of entitlement. “IT’S MY TURN! YOU’RE GOING TOO SLOW! I’M GOING FASTER, I DESERVE TO BE IN FRONT OF YOU! I’M TRYING TO GET TO (some destination that’s probably very similar to everyone else’s destination) AND IT’S URGENT!”
Weirdly my range of responses have also increased. They range from ‘unreasonable anger that someone can feel such entitlement’ to ‘oh well, I half expected that to happen’. I try to lean towards the latter, which actually helps me to be a better driver. I usually always say ‘a safe driver is a predictable driver’, but also supplement that with ‘just assume everyone around you is stupid and will make bad decisions’. Ironically, the bad drivers tend to be the most easily predictable.
A few weeks ago, I was riding my bicycle on the street I live on, heading for a stop sign, when one of my neighbors driving their SUV passed me, not caring I was stopping at the stop sign. When I’m on my bike, I normally slow down and roll through this sign if it’s safe, but this time, a pickup was coming on the cross street. The neighbor rolled out right in front of the pickup without stopping - she was so intent on passing me that she completely ignored everything else. I even pointed at the truck because I had a feeling she was going to do that. Fortunately, the pickup was going slow enough to stop and avoid a collision. I just shook my head as the people in the pickup waved at me.
“Must Get In Front” is the term cyclists use for drivers that do stupid shit to pass us, only to pull into a driveway or something similar a moment later, instead of just waiting for a few seconds for the situation to resolve itself.
Corollary data for cyclist fatalities shows a similar increase over the same timeframe https://bikeleague.org/new-fatality-data-for-2021-shows-increase-in-bicyclist-deaths/
Of the 1,230 bicyclist deaths in 2021, 853 died in motor-vehicle crashes and 377 in other incidents, according to National Center for Health Statistics mortality data. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/bicycle-deaths
Well, you’ll probably get away with it.
One word: SUV
