Partly the ridiculous sized vehicles. Partly the fact that nearly every single person driving is watching Netflix, while browsing TikTok, while eating a big Mac and running late cause they have no time management skills. And they are driving 20-30 mph over the speed limit, full of road rage, with no concern for anyone or anything. The only person on the road that matters is them.
I’ll stick with my boring, boomer sedans. I genuinely don’t enjoy driving SUVs and light trucks–primarily due to the blind spot issue and high hoods that the article describes.
Options for reasonable sized cars is the US have decreased. Mega trucks ans SUVs are what sells, I guess.
Part of this increase may also be because there are a lot of people out there driving like there are no consequences to their actions. Is it just because I am older, or are there more aggressive speeder out there?
There’s just more fucking people in general so the odds of encountering the worst of them goes up
deleted by creator
In Japan, there is tax benefits if your car fits certain dimensions. That’s why there are so many small boxy cars in Japan. I don’t understand why this isn’t a thing anywhere else. It has so many benefits: Fuel economy, parking space, pedestrian safety, …
But no, “I can see better if I sit higher” is still the #1 killer argument for these urban tanks.
“I can see better” says so much about a person’s psychology.
Americans gladly go into more debt to show off the things they can’t afford
Dutch road tax is by weight.
In Finland, car sales tax and yearly tax are based on the Co2 output, and it worked quite well to keep most cars small, light and efficient. Until hybrid and electric cars arrived on the market, that is…
There really does seem to be a kind of social cohesiveness in other countries. In America it’s dog eat dog and fuck everyone else as long as I get mine.
its to stroke the egos of soccer moms, and overcompensating men.
But I need a massive truck to carry groceries and 2 kids.
/s
The real horror is the trend. Between 2009 and 2023, pedestrian deaths rose a staggering 80%, while all other traffic fatalities increased just 13%. In a decade-plus span, pedestrians have been dying at a rate nearly seven times faster than population growth. This isn’t random. It’s the intentional outcome of systems designed to prioritize vehicles over people.
Shameful and pathetic, what a material abandonment of the social contract.
We need to switch to EVs to protect the environment
But also no efforts to keep vehicles from getting bigger and heavier, which not only uses more resources (in construction and during use) but also increases danger to pedestrians and cyclists.
Interesting to me is some new cars will auto brake before crashing, so I guess the issue is “fixed”.
That would be included in the data. The auto braking is also worse when it comes to to pedestrians than other cars if I’m remembering a report from a little while that came out correctly.
feels like the tone of this title is forgetting about the shareholders, which I do not take kindly to
This is an accepted part of the economy. Our leaders have decided us dying for private profit is fine. Now add up all the accepted deaths per year from every product and service and see how many of us are sacrificed for profit.
The article doesn’t talk about the fact that the increase is far greater in dark conditions, which is not readily explained by the changes to car design the article discusses.
This article talks more about that, and the linked report suggests population trends have contributed to more people walking at night along arterial roads with poor pedestrian infrastructure.
To be clear, daytime fatalities are up by about 40% in the interval shown, which is much more than the increase in population. Increasing vehicle size and hood height are real problems too, but don’t seem to be the biggest factor.
Daytime fatalities are up 26.5% on this graph. Not good, but not 40%. Population growth was 8.5% over that period
Vehicle numbers are also an important metric to look at, as they grew about 16-17% during the same timeframe. Add the two together and you’re not far from 26.5%.
I don’t think you can just add those together since an added person will mostly also be an added car. In fact, since cars grew faster than people, perhaps there are fewer pedestrians now. We can’t really say.
There are sidewalks on both sides of the street in my neighborhood. People are walking 2 abreast in the street at night and joggers are commonly running about 4 feet into the street from the curb.
Regardless of the article’s findings, some people are just oblivious.
Morons existed long before 2009. They are not a new phenomenon that accounts for a 40% increase in casualties. So your point, astute though it may be, is tangential to the article.
My wife is a medical coder for the ED, for more than a dozen hospitals and says the overwhelming area for vehicle fatalities she codes is intersections crossing in front of traffic. Particularly trying to make the yellow. The plural of anecdote isn’t data mind you, but she’s been at this for 15+ years and has a pretty good sense of it.
Those are pretty staggering numbers considering the population has only grown by maybe 12% in that same timeframe.
