I found this in USA Today. It reminded me of the West Carson Street meeting the other night, so I thought I would post it.... (Link to full story is at the bottom of the post.)
The USA is getting riskier for people on foot, and experts aren't sure why.
Pedestrian deaths rose sharply last year.
New data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that pedestrian fatalities rose 4.2% in 2010 over the previous year. The number of pedestrians injured in motor vehicle crashes soared 19%, to 70,000.
Experts are puzzled by the increase, which comes as road fatalities in most categories are dropping. The jump follows four straight years of falling pedestrian deaths, and a 14% decrease in pedestrian fatalities from 2000 to 2009.
"Quite frankly, I don't know why they went up," says James Hedlund, a former NHTSA official who researched pedestrian safety in January for the Governors Highway Safety Association. "Nobody knows. As far as I can tell, nobody has studied the issue. The data (are) too new."
Possible explanations for the increase vary:
•Walkers are put at risk by the preponderance of wide, high-speed roads designed to move large numbers of vehicles but not with pedestrians in mind.
"What we have seen anecdotally around the country is that more people are walking, biking, trying to get to their destination by means other than a car," says David Goldberg, spokesman for Transportation for America, a safety advocacy coalition that reports annually on the deadliest cities for pedestrians (the three worst are all in Florida: Orlando, Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater and Jacksonville).
"What we do know is that conditions have not improved substantially for pedestrians. The road design problems we pointed out in our report earlier this year are still out there."
The article continues…..
More at http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-12-08/pedestrian-casualties-increase/51748592/1
(And pedestrians are not held blameless in the article.)
anecdotally I would suggest that there are more pedestrians. I've heard more comments in the past year or two from people who just aren't driving for financial reasons. The other stuff too, with each repaving of a road it gets widened and they throw in a few new sprawly shopping desinations and the traffic gets worse.
regression toward the mean?
My guess is that distracted and careless driving is rising, but cars are becoming more safe for the passengers.
My guess is that distracted and careless driving is rising
Due to more distractions for the drivers: smartphones.
And more distractions for pedestrians. The article clearly mentions texting while walking as a contributing factor. Pedestrians ARE sometimes at fault, as you all know.
Joggers with ear-buds anyone?
I mean, if this can happen...
http://www.wistv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12148843
Yeah, anybody, really. A lot of consider this the "distracted generation" (though generation is a bad word, since the issue of distraction is cross-generational). We are often "plugged in" to many things at once.
^ agree
I see so many people jaywalking without looking, or crossing when they have a red light, or walking while playing with their phones, maybe that's part of it too?
@rsprake My guess is that distracted and careless driving is rising, but cars are becoming more safe for the passengers
There is a much-discussed phenonmena in car-safety devices: none of them save as many lives as would be predicted.
It's beleived that the perception of increased safety leads to unsafe behaviors.
^^^ See Risk compensation, for links to several studies on the subject.
That risk compensation information is excellent.
A while back I remember reading some, I think British, study that concluded that among the general public, there is some threshold of traffic fatalities above which the public is willing to support increased traffic safety measures, and below which, some level of fatalities are just "acceptable" and unavoidable. But I haven't ever been able to find that information again.
edmonds, here is a discussion in the new york times including the author of "traffic: why we drive the way we do (and what it says about us)". he quotes freeman dyson, describing r.j. smeed's work, as saying:
People will drive recklessly until the number of deaths reaches the maximum they can tolerate. When the number exceeds that limit, they drive more carefully. Smeed’s Law merely defines the number of deaths that we find psychologically tolerable.
@HV: That book is an excellent read, I would highly recommend it to most everyone, especially those specifically interested in the nature of traffic and other traffic phenomena.
