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.

Require anything built on a truck frame to require a commercial license or a rural address.

My recommendation in the dangerous situation when you’re your 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.

But why would pedestrian deaths go up if they’re being more illuminated?

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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.

Now they’re “pedestrian proof”.

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and less enjoyable to walk.

Which, incidentally, is great for car manufacturers!

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If you can’t see pedestrians on the road (on time) you’re either driving too fast, or you’re not paying enough attention, or you’re driving a car that is not suited for roads with pedestrians. That’s totally on the driver.

Leaving that aside, what do you think causes the increase? Dark clothes getting more popular…? I believe it’s the rising popularity of bigger cars with bad visibility (and maybe also the increase of phone usage while driving).

At the end of the day though, you’re the one behind the wheel of a multiple ton death machine, and as long as pedestrians are following the law, the blame lies solely with you if you hit them, even if it’s dark with no lights and they’re dressed in dark clothing. It’s not illegal for a pedestrian to exist in dark clothes at night. If you can’t handle that responsibility, then you’re probably not fit to operate a vehicle.