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Why pedestrian deaths in the US are at a 40-year high
(www.vox.com)
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this post was submitted on 04 Jan 2024
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They're blaming road design? That's the American way, take no responsibility, blame the object for killing the person or the weather or something else. It's because people are asshole jerks, they get high and get behind the wheel of a car, and they don't give a damn about the value of human life anymore. For example, in Utah this past week alone, they report hundreds of people mowed down by cars even though those people were in crosswalks.
In Utah, people actually believe that it's OK to kill someone with your car, if that person is not in a designated crosswalk or if you have "right of way." I don't know where they get that idea from - the first page of the driver's handbook says "Pedestrian traffic always has right of way over oncoming cars, even if the person isn't in a designated crosswalk."
But people choose to believe misinformation and actually think they won't go to jail for running someone down. As if killing someone with a car isn't actually cold blooded murder (and it is). So, if you're in Utah, don't use a crosswalk OR ever walk in the street, you're signing your death warrant and tempting drivers to "try out" what happens if they run you over.
Of course people go to jail for manslaughter here all the time because of this belief. In my neighborhood alone - kids get killed by cars all the time in school crosswalks here, it's a game to the drivers.
It's simple, and not really helpful to just blame individual drivers. Obviously, if you carelessly run over a pedestrian cause you are busy texting, it's your fault, but there are many other things at play. That's basically the same as saying obesity is the fault of people eating too much. It's true, but it's also misleading.
There's a system called the "hierarchy of controls" that is used in occupational and industrial applications to address hazards. The idea is to solve as many things as possible at the highest level of controls, so that you reduce reliance on lower level controls.
The hazard is that high velocity transportation can result in injury of death.
The first level of control is elimination of the hazard. Obviously we can't get rid of travel, but we can get rid of a lot of it by designing our cities to put all the things people need (jobs, groceries, leisure) close to where they live. We can promote remote work. Less distance traveled on a population level means less death.
The second level of control is substitution. In this case, that might mean switching people to safer modes of transit. Trains, bikes, walking, etc. Less distance driven means less death.
The third level is engineering controls. This is things like having cars be physically disconnected from where pedestrians, cyclists, etc are. Bollards, pedestrianized zones, separate bike routes, etc. Also in this category are things like speed bumps and traffic calming measures like narrowed or curving streets. Design features of cars can be engineering controls, too. Lower height vehicles, vehicles with pedestrian warning systems, etc. Less interaction between cars and people means less death.
The fourth level is administrative controls. This is things like speed limits, stop lights and signs, cross walks, drunk driving laws, texting while driving laws, etc. These all rely on rules to be followed, which is a fairly inefficient way to operate.
The last level is personal protective equipment. This would be things like reflectors on pedestrian clothing, helmets on cyclists, etc.
When cars first became common, and deaths started to creep up in number. Auto manufacturers refused to improve design to be safer, because that would mean acknowledging that design could be considered at fault. If everyone drove perfectly, there would be no deaths, right? So they just blamed drivers and pedestrians instead. BP did the same thing by popularizing the concept of a personal "carbon footprint". The plastics industry (among other companies) popularized the idea of "littering" as a thing individual people did that was wrong to distract from the fact they they were making all of the trash in the first place. Ever hear the Smoky the Bear slogan, "only you can prevent forest fires"? How about "only concerted international effort to reduce the effects of anthropogenic climate change can prevent forest fires"?
By focusing on drivers, you are doing the same thing as all those corporations.
You mentioned obesity, that was due to a series of skillful lies and a bit of scientific fraud.
The first was Ancel Keys who did a study that showed saturated fats (from meat, eggs) were protective but pretended it said they shortened people lives with heart disease
Then there was "research" from Kelloggs and Sanitarium that said grain was good for you
Then there was Coca Cola "research" that said sugar was good
Then there were three Seventh Day Adventists who got positions of power and said meat was bad, vegetarianism good (because meat causes masturbation)
So people increased their sugar, increased their vegetable oil, increased processed food, reduced meat and got fat, or if naturally thin, just got unhealthy
It turns out our only healthy diet is low carbohydrate. A little bread, some veg, a good amount of meat
Yes but high velocity transportation such as cars come with built-in safety features to help prevent injuries and death. But people are stupid, and won't use their seatbelts, or have their cars inspected. And they do text and use phones while driving.
When you're talking on a phone, your mind is picturing the thing your discussing over the phone. It is not focused on the road or what's going on around you. Distracted driving continues to kill people right left and sideways in our state.
It's not that driving a car HAS to be dangerous. It really is designed to be as simple and safe as possible. BUT - it does have one big requirement. THAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THE DRIVING PART. Your peripheral vision also helps in avoiding oncoming disaster, but you have to be engaged in watching the road for it to be of any help.
I've seen several accidents play out right in front of me, where both drivers were not paying attention at the same time. That's all it takes to make driving a disaster. And yet, it seems like people would rather have that than be responsible people and leave the phone calls for later.
Driving a car will always be dangerous whether you pay attention or not. It's not "responsible" to leave calls for after you drive. The fact that we have to drive huge machines by ourselves at all is irresponsible.
It's "responsible" to vote for politicians who will fix the problem by starting at the very top of the hierarchy of controls, rather than trying to blame administrative controls for not working.
Do you really think that road design doesn't matter at all, and all designs are equally (un)safe?
Consider a library with a parking lot across the street.
In one design, the street is four lanes, 45 mph, and there's no crosswalk. The expectation is for people to walk a quarter mile out of the way to the nearby intersection.
In the other design: the road is 25 mph, with only two narrow lanes. There's a crosswalk that's over a speed table, with chicanes before and after.
Do you really expect both designs to have equal numbers of deaths?
Road design DOES matter and there's no question that bad roads where I live (in Utah where they cheaped out and bought pavement that ended up cracking all over the roadways) do damage cars and make driving a lot more unsafe. I'm not saying that road design simply doesn't matter, that would be absurd.
But in Utah, it doesn't matter how well designed the roads are. Even with clearly marked pedestrian crossings and lights, cars run the lights and kill people all the time here because, utahns believe they won't be charged if they kill someone with their car.
I know it's hard to believe, but it's absolutely true - they really believe it's OK to kill people on the sidewalks, streets, or in crosswalks.
You can always count on people to be irresponsible, selfish, and reckless. So yeah its bad road design to count on people to be safe, when they just aren't.
It's true, people are irresponsible and reckless. Cars do have safety features, and actually they're designed to be easy to drive and brake as needed. The problem isn't the cars or the roads, it's the people behind the wheel. Driving requires attentiveness and courtesy, two things that apparently no longer exist in human beings.
Driving requires courtesy and attention, but overreliance on cars make people the opposite.
People get frustrated driving in traffic, causing them to be rude and agressive.
Meanwhile if driving is the only way to get around, even for easily distracted people or busy or whatever, they are not going to pay proper attention. Safety features like blind spot detection and automatic crash avoidance just make people pay even less attention.
You say the problem isn't cars, but it is because in america cars are the only way to get around for most trips.
If you make other options more conpelling or faster, than these problems are less severe for those left on the road.
The study does not only blame road design, which is a big problem, but they also discuss the American culture of in car smartphone use, particularly because American cars are far more likely to have automatic transmissions than their peer counterparts, such as Europe, where manual transmissions are far more likely (74%). As a result, Americans have a free hand available while driving to use their smart phones, where those in countries with prevalent manual transmissions do not.
Contributing factors include the American surge in homelessness, as those types of people tend to hang around the most dangerous roads at night and in numbers. 
But honestly if you live in Utah, you learn not to use crosswalks or try to cross the street at all. It's almost always 100% a recipe for getting killed. Even police have to look for other ways to pull cars over, because if both cars pull to the side of the street or highway, they will get hit by oncoming traffic because people in Utah do NOT look at the road when they are driving. This is a very dangerous state, the worst statistically for auto accidents anywhere in the world.
So why do road deaths happen at dramatically different rates in different countries that have very different transportation design?
Is it a better explanation that the Netherlands has road designs that better promote safety, or more conscientious drivers?
They have less drivers and more pedestrians. Pedestrians aren't the issue, it's the drivers.
Their infrastructure, in cities especially, discourages driving and encourages walking/cycling/public transport. Other places make their infrastructure car first. Too much traffic widen the roads, add car parks and remove walkways. These make more driver that are less empathetic to pedestrians as they have less experience as a pedestrian. They also encourage bigger and higher vehicles that are more deadly on impact.
More pedestrians means more people about for drivers to kill, though. The Netherlands still has a lot of people driving.
It's less about driver empathy, and more about traffic calming. Bollards, chicanes, speed humps at intersections, etc. Streets that don't feel safe to speed excessively on. Not making everything a shitty stroad, but having better differentiation between streets and roads.
Not just bikes has a pretty good YouTube video about stroads vs Dutch streets and roads