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75% More Pedestrians Have Been Killed Since 2009. Giant Trucks and SUVs Are Why (www.thedrive.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 7 points 2 months ago (11 children)

The minima at 2009-2010 is absurdly clear though. You undid 20 years of progress in about 10 years. I'm honestly shocked - what happened in 2009 to cause this? I would think increasing truck sizes would cause a much more shallow minima, since truck sizes don't suddenly increase from one year to the next.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (8 children)

    The rise of smartphones with instant messengers might have contributed to that.
    Texting and driving is a thing...
    ...which triggers a certain kind of rage/hate in me when I spot people doing that, which I usually do several times each day.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    That also happens in Europe and yet you don't see a similar increase in pedestrian deaths.

    What did not happen in Europe but did in the US during that time frame was the invasion of roads by personal tanks.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    So many other variables though. European cities are designed so much better for pedestrians and cyclists. I’d argue that the driving standards are also higher in a lot of areas. Speeds often slower too since infrastructure is designed for mixed use. In North America the actual design of most roads is almost hostile to pedestrians. It’s clearly a mix a factors.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (3 children)

    Such differences remained steady during that time frame, so whilst they explain the actual baseline levels, they don't explain the change in trend that happened in the US but not in Europe.

    (What you suggest would only make sense if in 2009 the road infrastructure design, driving standards and average speeds became much worse in the US and kept getting worse, something not really supported by observation of those things)

    The most logical conclusion is that something changed in one place that did not change in the other.

    The biggest change that happened in the US but not in Europe in that time frame was the in the US the prevalence and size of light trucks increased massivelly but not at all in Europe. Further, as we see in this study such vehicles are far more dangerous to pedestrians, so this specific change that happens in one geographical zone but not the other does seem to be the most likely explanation. Certainly this is a lot more logical than an increase in mobile phone use whilst driving (as that also happened in Europe) or the better road conditions in Europe vs the US (as that didn't change even though the rate of pedestrian deaths in the US reversed its trend and started climbing up whilst in Europe it remained on a trend of slowing falling down)

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Road speed has definitely increased since then. Cars are more powerful than ever and easier to drive blindly.

    Road conditions have also changed. Europe has invested heavily in well designed infrastructure with a clearly stated goal of reducing road deaths.

    Large vehicles in North America are clearly a major part of the problem but trying to be this reductionist seems pretty weird.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Road speed has definitely increased since 2009 exactly and by so much that the trend of falling pedestrian deaths in the US completelly turned around!????

    Also I've actually lived in 3 countries of Europe since 2009 and beyond a handful of larger cities (such as Paris) closing a handful of streets and making them pedestrian only, pedestrian infrastructure has barelly improved in that period.

    Absolutelly, Europe invested in much better infrastructure than the US, especially for pedestrians and cyclists, but that long predates 2009 - in fact Europe always had much more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure than the US, even in the most car friendly countries in Europe.

    Methinks you're trying too to exculpate the huge increase in average car size in the US.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    How do you get to that conclusion? I clearly state I believe it to be a major factor. I just don’t get why this place is so vehemently against confounding variables. It reads the same as US propaganda but opposite. Yeah, trucks bad, US bad. It’s just clearly not so simple. The US is huge and a rural town and major city have little in common. The trend is everywhere.

    You can believe what you want but data from the ETSC (European Transport Safety Council) and ERSO (European Road Safety Observatory) is pretty clear. Reducing it to little cars is really slighting what Europe has accomplished. Car size is important but there has been so much more done. Little things like moving money from heavy vehicle corridors to raised sidewalks have both immediate (like visibility of pedestrians) and emergent effects (like driving culture changes).

    This place is getting worse than Reddit.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    You may be right, but as with the trucks, I would expect a much less sharp minima: Smartphone and instant messaging adoption didn't happen all at once, but from this graph we see that we're going from a substantial year-on-year decrease directly to a large year-on-year increase. A change that is gradually adopted over the course of several years can't really cause that kind of effect.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    The minima at 2009-2010 is absurdly clear though. You undid 20 years of progress in about 10 years. I’m honestly shocked - what happened in 2009 to cause this?

    Dumb as fuck EPA emissions standards

    But the US Department of Transportation was concerned that smaller vehicles are less safe in the event of an accident, and this department oversees Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards. Hence, the agency discouraged manufacturers from reducing vehicle size to meet the standards by ensuring that the Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards require higher fuel economy for smaller vehicles than for larger vehicles.

    ...

    Since the adoption of size-based standards in 2012, new vehicles have been getting larger, and sales have shifted from cars to light trucks. Between 2011 and 2022, the average vehicle footprint (roughly, the area defined by the four wheels) increased by about 4 percent, and the share of cars in total sales dropped from about 65 percent to 40 percent. In the GHG standards that EPA proposed in April this year, the agency notes that the increasing size and shift from cars to trucks has increased average emissions rates by about 10 percent.

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