Another thing that really stood out to me in that piece asking "why did American drivers start killing more and more pedestrians at night since 2008" ...
... was this data point:
According to the reporters, after a driver hits a pedestrian, "police typically don’t ask people involved if they were using phones"
If that's true, and I have no immediate reason to doubt the reporting, that is nuts
(Obviously, the driver may not answer truthfully, but if the driver has killed a pedestrian, one would imagine the investigation ought to require the turning over of phone-activity logs for the time immediately preceding the death)
@clive even if people are not actively holding their phones in their hands I wonder if the larger brighter displays inside of cars are helping to kill people's night vision in addition to the distraction of glancing down at the GPS or other alerts that might be popping up on the dash
@clive I don't know, I feel like the "at night" part there is significant in regards to it being solely the responsibility of a distraction. People use cellphones at least as much during the day while driving (anecdotally I've seen less at night, but don't have statistics.) At this point I feel like it's just a background stat and this is separate.
Yeah, that's the thing -- cellphone use seems omnipresent, right?
The article did point out that there are extra bursts of mobile-phone use at the end of the day, when people get off work -- that can correlate with driving/commuting, and driving/commuting in the dark
But these are marginal things; this dismal trend is probably driven by a whole lot of mutually reinforcing trends
@clive Yeah, don't get me wrong. Cell phone usage has been objectively proved to cause an increase in accidents. The problem is that there is now so much and it's so, as you put it, omnipresent, that it's basically background now. Like how we don't count car stereo systems or air even though they may have been reaching to adjust them while driving at some point.
There are indeed bursts, but those bursts happen all hours. I'd imagine the most is more around 5pm-ish?
“Nobody ever looks at the car as a weapon,” Naparstek said. “The basic rule that I discovered over the years is if you ever want to murder someone in New York City, do it with a car.”
@kkarhan@clive@notjustbikes
Chuck Marohn's whole message is that we build our streets so that drivers are safe at high speeds, and then we wonder why people speed, or cause traffic collisions.
Cell phones, drunk driving, and overall other distractions exacerbate the problem, but the root of the problem is that , simply, our roads are too wide.
@clive
The main reason I haven't gotten an ebike yet is that I'm a motorcycle rider and am terrified of riding slower than the rest of traffic, being passed constantly where there is no accommodation for passing. Yep, USA.
@clive one of the most puzzling aspects of this, to me, is that it’s US specific, and a lot of the potential causes being discussed here and in the OP also exist in Europe/ROW - I.e. smartphones, led lighting, inebriation habits etc. What is different in the USA? What is unique to that country?
yeah, that’s the weird part. Canada is right next-door with a reasonably similar infrastructure and transportation make up, yet it has not seen the same trend the US has seen …
Though as someone pointed out in the thread, apparently the mix of cars and trucks in Canada is a little smaller than in the US — so to the extent that vehicle size matters however incrementally in this trend, Canada might differ a little bit there
They don't even mandate tests for head-on collisions with other cars
The makers of SUVs long ago lobbied heavily to ensure that would be left out of the spec ...
... knowing that if they were forced to test what happens when a jacked-up SUV hits a regular sedan head on ...
... it would show what the University of Buffalo discovered in an analysis of such head-on collisions: Enormously higher death rates for the folks in sedans
@clive I was almost hit once crossing the road at night. No other traffic, intersection with no traffic lights but stop signs, well illuminated by street lights (yellow shifted similar to incandescent, so not blindingly bright). Minivan driver didn’t see me until they were in the intersection.
Thankfully I was fully aware of their presence and did not get hit.
Basically comes down to poor driving standards and a lack of care from drivers (at least in the US), at least from my perspective (from various states).
@clive Read the comments section, which points to an obvious problem: the blinding high Kelvin LED lights on SUVs and trucks. Apparently technology exists and is used in Europe and Canada to make headlights safer for oncoming drivers and pedestrians. That's more convincing to me than distracted driving, which occurs at all times of the day.
@clive I personally would hypothesize and like to see tested how our eyes adjust from bright lights inside the cab being glanced at to a darker night environment. People glance at their phones, smartwatches or installed LCD display quickly to check stuff like directions, the name of the song playing, a text, their A/C, etc. Beyond just distraction, which would also be a factor during the day, our eyes take time to adjust to lower light conditions and quick glances at the bright displays (and as others in this thread have noted brighter headlights) would be my guess for the increase in night time collisions.
@clive Was being serious though, someone with a dark colored hoodie, which most of them are, and their hood up in the dark is much harder to spot and recognize as 'theres and person there' in a brief instant. Especially if it's from behind and the driver is distracted by other stuff. At least if the pedestrian has a phone there's a spot of light there.
@clive Anecdotally, I’ve noticed (in TX) that pedestrians rarely wait for the walk signal or even look before they cross anymore. Doesn’t matter if they have their phone out or not, they just amble into fast moving traffic, completely unaware.
During the day, drivers can see them on the sidewalks and anticipate when they’ll cross, but at night you often can’t see them until they’re in the road. More focused streetlights and headlights make this worse because less light reaches the sidewalk.
@clive Also seems like pedestrian signals at crosswalks are unmaintained and permanently malfunctioning – either they don’t give long enough to cross safely, give the walk signal when it isn’t safe (like when a turn lane has the green), stay on “don’t walk” forever, or are permanently out of order. The call buttons (even if not smashed by vandals) NEVER do anything.
Curiously given when the increase in deaths started, it looks like the US mandated major changes to crosswalk signals in 2009.
For me, crosswalks have seemed dodgy af for as long as I've been alive lol
As a pedestrian, I can tell the cars aren't paying any damn attention to them (even the ones with buttons and flashing lights don't register, because the lights aren't red typically); as a driver, I ... don't sometimes don't notice them!
Yep yep -- a bunch of folks have been wondering about the increasing brilliance of headlights, and also the shift to LED streelights, which in early generations weren't tuned very well
@futurebird@clive Beat me to it. They completely ruin your night vision.
It could also have something to do with pedestrian behavior at night being less restrained or people wearing more dark clothing, especially with hoods/hoods pulled up.
@clive Interesting article. What might be also special about the U.S. is their typical city street layout with long straight roads. Might causing distraction when the sun is rising or setting more easily.
@clive Article mentions smart phones – FOR DRIVERS. But fails to mention that pedestrians are zombies on their phones. I watched an ambulance with its sirens on have to STOP as a zombie-tard on his phone walked blindly in its path.
@clive Could it be that drivers at night are constantly blinded by the oncoming and rearview mirror headlights of gigantic vehicles with their lights half a meter too high, pointed straight forward like highbeams rather than down at the road, and 20x brighter than they should be?
When I first saw the headline my mind immediately skipped to "ever huger vehicles" as a likely cause
The folks the reporters spoke to didn't think that had much to do with it -- from their perspective, vehicles were already blooming high and big enough in the 00s that there wasn't any reason for 2008 to be a tipping point
@dalias@clive Yeah this is an obvious cause and it's weird that lighting wasn't mentioned in the article. I'm thinking 2008 is about when LED headlights started becoming prevalent, and with the added fun of SUVs mounting the "low" beams at eye level of a normal car, it doesn't matter whether people bother to turn off their high beams (which they don't, either).
Oncoming headlights are still the biggest issue though. I want glasses made out of some Clarke-tech metamaterial that doesn't dim most things but "takes the edge off" bright point sources.
@aburka@clive I just point my side mirrors at the ground by the rear wheels so I can ensure nothing's there when changing lanes without seeing any headlights.
Canada and the US are very similar in so many ways -- same vehicles, similar urban/suburban/rural infrastructures, same mobile phones and obsessions with them ... I don't know for sure but would guess they probably switched to highway LED lighting at the same time
Granted, this is just a guess on my part. And there's another factor here that the Times doesn't mention: Only fatal crashes have gone up. The total number of pedestrian crashes has been rock steady the entire time.
So: the problem is only fatal crashes at night among ages 18-64 in the US. That is indeed very peculiar. And it's at least worth a look to see if this suggests something going on among pedestrians, not just drivers.
@clive I found the article somewhat irksome in that it paints this kind of ‘we can’t pinpoint causes’ way when we do know many things that help - slowing speeds, engineering roads and shared spaces better, creating better pedestrian infrastructure. The USA has been an outlier in the developed world for not making these changes and for not having declining rates of injury and death on our streets. We can do better and we know how to do it. #Transport#StreetSafety#USA#VisionZero
100% -- when I posted this on Threads, @danhon noted that he just got back from Japan, where the driving infrastructure is much more designed to protect pedestrians
That said, the crappiness and pedestrian-hostile nature of the US's infrastucture could not, I would imagine, explain why this trend would emerge in 2008 ...
The infrastructure was pretty uniformly terrible before then also
@clive This older article was less bashful about naming alcohol as a major factor. They say it was a factor in 49% of crashes that resulted in a pedestrian death in 2021.
I actually wonder if there's something weird and social about our lack of response to that, and how it seems minimized in so much commentary. Either people are picking their preferred enemy, or not wanting to spoil the fun.
The only question would be, why would it begin to rise in 2008? It's possible the economic crisis would have had an impact on alcohol intake ... but it's unclear why it would have such a continuing one, eleven years later
@clive There are great many more statistics here. This one says that there have been increases in both drunk driving and speeding.
I can't help think that letting friends walk home drunk, because "they're only walking," is a big silent killer here. In a worst case scenario, let's say it, somewhat hammered and wearing fashionable black clothing.
Though it's not clear why that trend would emerge in 2008, and then go upwards
It may work alongside the point about the increase in working-poor populations in the suburbs -- more people living along huge arterial roads where cars really whip along, and where those lower-income folks are less likely to own cars and are thus more likely to be walking ... along roads that didn't use to have pedestrians
Puzzling and trying to get my own programs to update to look at NYC specific diurnal cycle in pedestrian injuries…
I wonder if the interior of vehicles themselves are brighter now. I only drive when on travel (and its unavoidable), but I always notice that the insides of rental cars are lit up like Xmas trees, ruining my vision outside of the vehicles. But that contrast of brightness often needs to be adjusted to the brightness of outside.
#NYC does NOT have the upward trend in night time ped injuries. See fig1/2 (why injury not death-- b/c NYC monthly ped death is too small)
NB 1:NYC Open Data starts in mid2012, not 2000 like the USA data; 2: covid19 reduced injuries, but we are creeping back up in general; 3: bike/scooter VS pedestrians is creeping up but still <<< car/truck injuries. #Urbanism
I’m set up to look at nyc open data not USA— on my to do list to start looking at that. (In theory, should be able to reproduce these plots I made by pulling from the USA database, and subsetting by nyc geographical region instead of pulling directly from NYC’s. )
@atthenius my pet theory is that the numbers go up as people grow more selfish starting in 2009. Anti-Obama Trumpism, social media, post-GFC jobs recession, general alienation. (I know this doesn't really explain the diurnal cycle.) Anyway I don't know if NYC is on the same rhythm as the rest of the USA on these big social shifts.
@stevenbodzin@atthenius my understanding is that deaths per VMT (miles traveled by car) are roughly constant and number of miles traveled is the only thing that has increased. Per-100k population charts need to be compared alongside VMT growth.
I don’t have that number to normalize by— esp bike and scooter miles traveled- and it’s not as easy to tailor per neighborhood in nyc because it is pass through commuters traveling by car at least.
I imagine that the scooter and bike trend up would disappear by normalizing by miles traveled. But the car number is more fixed. (And possibly increasing leading to covid)
The pedestrian miles traveled is Really hard to get. 🤔
@atthenius@stevenbodzin no, just car VMT primarily predicts people getting hit with cars, absent a massive shift in street design to reduce risk exposure (which I don't think NYC has reached at a network level.) There may be some "safety in numbers" effect from more walking and biking, but if it represented a shift in mode choice, that would bring car VMT down too.
@atthenius@stevenbodzin maybe a difference in how they define rural vs urban, but they're looking at per population charts and the actual factors are just how much people walk and how much car traffic they're exposed to (assuming typical unsafe road design.)
One of the most interesting analyses in that piece was the interplay between mobile phones and transmissions ...
Experts suspect that the near-dominance of automatic transmissions in the US may explain why rates of pedestrians-killed-by-nighttime-drivers has risen in the US but not in Europe or the UK ...
... because across the Atlantic, most cars are still stick-shift
Which means drivers there can't as easily use their phones while driving
Just to devil's advocate here... it ALSO shows that rural USA is worse than downtown USA pedestrian deaths.
You mostly have to use the clutch/shift when you are in stop and go mode (downtown), not so much while driving in rural areas.
Doesn't seem totally consistent w that hypothesis.
But maybe it is that the clutch slows you down anyhow bc tooling around a neighborhood in a high gear is a very visual reminder of HOW FAST you are going.
Just because many Europeans still drive stick doesn't immediately discourage them from using their phones at the wheel - what does is its a serious traffic violation in many countries that the cops actively look out for (in UK its a fine, 6 demerit points and young/new drivers can even get their licence revoked) and if anyone gets in a collision they will often get a court order for every piece of data from the phone and the car...
@clive I wonder if it's moving away from incandescent lights... somehow? That's the big change I remember from around that time but I can't see how the connection would work.
OK, suppose people, pedestrians or drivers, lose their night vision due to these new crop of blinding white lights and make mistakes...?
@TomSwirly@clive Not only those monstrous search lights masquerading as vehicle lighting, but if people really are interacting with smartphones more, then they are looking at a bright screen at close distance. So they lose both their night vision /and/ far focus. It takes a certain amount of time ere they can see what’s outside again. Couple that with automobile centric road design and you have a problem.
@TomSwirly@clive It absolutely is. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with newer more efficient lights, but the bulbs are all misdesigned to point straight forward rather than to work with the lens to point down at the road, and they're waaaaaay too bright.
@dalias@TomSwirly@clive The issue is the color temperature, and aim is off so we both nailed in the eyes with much too bright lights that also are this intense blue white light instead of a warm light that is not so piercing.
@InkySchwartz@dalias@TomSwirly@clive
Not to mention street lighting also.
High pressure sodium lamps, with their orangish narrow band simply light dark objects (i.e. people in non-reflective clothing) better than "full spectrum" LEDs.
@TomSwirly@clive I'm wondering the same thing. More and more in recent years I'm having a lot of issues driving at night. It isn't because LEDs exist, it's because currently things are poorly regulated and more poorly enforced. Numerous vehicles have lights that are too bright (probably third party) or improperly installed (put a LED in a reflective lens upside down and it almost appears like it's stuck on bright.) Lately many even drive with their actual brights on.
@TomSwirly@clive What I'm wondering here is if the problem isn't, ironically, too much light. Too many are "night blinded" more and more between all those brights, improperly installed lights, and frankly straight up illegally too bright (but not enforced) third party lights. Pedestrians typically aren't wearing lights on themselves even if they wear reflective clothing, so it could be quite easy to miss them relative to other vehicles.
That's a really interesting way of looking at it (no pun intended) ... I think it could easily be true
With a lot of spotlighted areas that are brighter than ever, it casts the non-illuminated stuff -- like pedestrians -- into a deeper shadow by contrast
It really doesn't help that Amazon and the like are flooded with lights fighting each other over who can promise the most lumens. They're all lying, but most are still way too much all the same -- essentially they may just as well be stuck permanently on bright even when on low.
At this point I feel like the only way to safely be a pedestrian at night is to have a vest with simulated car lights.
When I cycle at night I'm lit up like a damn roman candle -- lights on the front and back of the bike, helmet with blinking bright lights fore and aft (and this is in NYC where things are pretty brightly lit; I'm not sure I'd risk riding at night on one of those suburban arteries where cars really start flying at a serious clip)
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