Over the same period, such deaths declined in most other developed nations, according to United Nations data.
From the WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-deadly-1-5-mile-corridor-that-shows-the-fatal-flaw-in-americas-road-design-8f424579
Terrible infrastructure decisions combined with massive tank sized vehicles going 40 mph down side streets while many are stressed out working 2 jobs looking down at their smart phone to see if they’re going to be late. Surprised?
And company policies that consider 1 minute late to be penalty-worthy. And long vast stretches of straight road. (“Design roads like barrels and people will drive like bullets.”)
Longer and longer commutes…
Unpredictable jams and construction…
It’s all fundamentally designed in opposition to human well-being.
I still remember when a coworker a while back came to work the first time an hour late because their alarm didn’t go off in the morning and they were freaking out. One of the reasons I left. I seriously hate that culture entirely.
Well according to the numbers its clear that instead of dying overseas they are coming to the US to get run over /s
It’s insane how terrible our oversized suvs and trucks have gotten. There is a 12" blind spot in front of many of them now where you can’t see someone sitting down or a small child.
Absolutely insanity.
Hostile, selfish, and distracted drivers
The drivers are a constant. This is a symptom of regulatory capture.
The cars are not the same. This is a consequence of regulatory failure, though.
You can call it failure, but it’s serving someone that engineered it. This isn’t merely a failure to act or an unforeseen consequence, intentional choices have been made that knowingly trade human well-being for commercial interests. This is government serving capital interests before humanity or its own citizens.
I say it’s specifically regulatory capture because of the way one regulatory body is defeating protections provided by another one. The dangerous and popular class of vehicles exist to thwart regulations that apply to what was previously considered normal-sized vehicles. If they could they would have just done away with the regulations, but they are limited to their captured offices’ authority.
Sure, it is a failure from the perspective of public interest. It isn’t an accident.
Terrible street design which prioritizes speed of cars over the safety of the community. The rich and selfish get to kill everyone else so they don’t have to wait a bit longer crossing town.
Added bonus: the cars also pollute the fuck out of your home in the process.
In addition, the tarmac tanks get bigger and bigger to a point where you just can’t see pedestrians at all.
I’m not paranoid. THEY are after ME!
How did they go up in 2020 in the us
This is a very good question. Naively one would think that the pandemic would cut the number of miles driven and therefore fatalities.
However, I also recall that after lockdowns there was a clear drop in driving skills due to a lack of practice which may have offset The lower vehicle miles.
Just for a better understanding, it would ve interested to see how the share of pedestrians developed in that time. Did decrease, remain similar or even increase?
Isn’t this largely to do with American car safety standards focusing only on the occupants of the car, rather than both the occupants and other people? Isn’t the Cybertruck rated as one of the safest vehicles by US standards but is considered to dangerous to be driven on most European roads for this reason?
There is no evaluation of the Cybertruck in the EU, but your general description is not entirely wrong. Tesla never even tried to make that ztash can street legal in the EU, knowing that their front facing stainless steel blades have no chance because they are insane from a pedestrian safety perspective and their are rules that forbid that.
Safety authorities and regulators in the US obviously don’t care much about the life of pedestrians. If they did, the Cyvertruck would not be street legal in its current form.
As both a pedestrian and on the road, I’ve almost gotten killed on my bike so many times I’m surprised I’m not dead yet
Paywall
US is really crushing it!
US is crushing something. Pedestrians and cyclists, it seems.
It’s interesting to me that Italians have such a terrible reputation for being dangerous on the roads, and even at the start of the graph period they had lower pedestrian fatalities than the USA.
That reputation is understated, but I think it’s still a more walkable country in general.
It IS that bad. However, when compared to the US, there are safety measures in place here that allow us to survive even if the drivers are awful.
To be fair, it’s anecdotical, but considering the amount of craziness I see every day in my city, i’m amazed at the low amount of deaths.
The US is de-civilizing itself out of frustration
Canada too, ripping out bike lanes.
If US Baby Boomers could read.
Always been a state of barbaric cruelty. Literally founded by enslavers.
Don’t forget that it was in part religious people who left Europe, because Europe was not religious enough for them, in the 18th and 19th century.
It really does blow my mind, if you look at graph after graph of the US compared to the world, so much of the world is in line and the US is a constant outlier and yet people venimently state how good things are and “it’s just because the US is so big”, which is a complete fallacy.
I remember when roundabouts started to proliferate in the last 10-15 years and how there’s an uproar every time a town builds a new one… but clearly it’s an imperative to design roads in a way that is deliberately inconvenient and forces carbrains to fucking pay attention.
I see roundabouts as a mixed thing. For many car oriented places they are indeed a much better design. They can be made ok for pedestrians but especially without traffic lights (or on streets with very light or very slow traffic) they tend to be more dangerous as many car drivers exiting round abouts are appearing quite suddenly and are often too fast, even if there is a pedestrian crossing. Many round abouts don’t have priorty for pedestrian to start with. Ireland had a lot of absolutely terrible roundabouts for pedestrians at least a decade ago. I don’t know if it got any better. Lots of traffic, no priority for pedestrians, fairly high speeds. It always felt as if you had to run for your life when crossing the road there.
As someone without a car in the US, I am obviously pro-urban pedestrian infrastructure. We need more and better busses, and far more walking / biking options that keep us away from cars entirely. If you can’t walk from any one place to any other in a city, that’s two or more cities in a trench coat, you know?
I do wonder what a graph of average driven hours would do to this chart. Per 100,000 people of course shows more are dying per person. But if US citizens drive twice the total hours(completely made up number) as those in other countries, then we would actually have less pedestrian deaths per driven hour no?
per hours driven our per km driven is a car centric misleading number for many purposes. That is because car centric planning increases the distances one needs to drive, without creating additional value. Going to the supermarket doesn’t get any better just because the supermarket is double as far away. So the per 100,000 people number is a better representation.
Of course, people having to drive longer and further also means higher risk of deaths and accidents but that is just a compounding issue caused by car centric design itself. It is part of the problem, not some externalised factor that should be compensated for.
On the other hand, the US has far fewer people walking around than those other countries, and this is per capita, not per 100k pedestrians
While I do agree that we probably have less “per hour driven” I think this metric is important because it still reflects the danger to the average person. If I get hit by a car it’s not going to make me feel any better to know “that person was driving for a really long time before they hit you”.
Factually it’s an interesting metric. But it doesn’t make pedestrians feel any safer
i mean, those plebs pedestrians and kids just walking around are basically asking for it /s
The only way to stop a bad driver with a truck is a good pedistrian with a truck.
That’s more or less the sales pitch for bigger and bigger vehicles; “Protect your family from big vehicles by buying a bigger vehicle today!”
There are still too many people who forgot how to drive during pandemic.
For example, just the other day my dog was almost murdered because some idiot came zooming around the bend and “stopped” well past the crosswalk we were in. At an all-way stop sign. With cars already stopped.
