Over the same period, such deaths declined in most other developed nations, according to United Nations data.
From the WSJ article: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-deadly-1-5-mile-corridor-that-shows-the-fatal-flaw-in-americas-road-design-8f424579
As both a pedestrian and on the road, I’ve almost gotten killed on my bike so many times I’m surprised I’m not dead yet
that’s a problem that will fix itself when there are no more pedestrians left
Between the rise of SUVs, and the increase in distracted driving, I’m not surprised in the slightest.
We really need to treat driving offenses with way more scrutiny.
I found out recently that operating a boat while intoxicated is a mandatory jail sentence. Meanwhile there are people out driving drunk right now who are 3+ DUIs.
I think it should be 1 and done. After that, you should have to choose between being legally allowed to purchase alcohol, or being legally allowed to drive, and if you blow over 0.00 on a breathalyzer after that, it’s an automatic 10 year sentence.
You should lose your license for drunk driving for at least a year minimum, mandatory. Or be thrown in the stockade and have tomatoes thrown at ya for 3 weeks. Or both.
What about when the cops make you blow into a breathalyzer multiple times until it puts you over the legal limit? It’s the citizens’ responsibility to tell then to reset the machine.
I was too poor to afford a lawyer. To someone who was only 21 and just getting started on his own that ruined my early adult life financially. Over $15,000 for all the classes, court costs, additional insurance, etc. This was early 2000s, I don’t even want to adjust that amount for inflation.
Maybe think before you decide other people’s fate. What happened to me can and does happen to anyone the police don’t like.
Laws to prosecute police officers that provide false testimony or fabricate evidence?
Personally, I see saving the 30+ people who are going to die from drunk driving every day as more important than the serious (but seldom) consequences that happened to you due to a corrupt/incompetent cop and lawyer. No offense.
I wish financial hardhsip on you, then.
That won’t be possible until there are practical alternatives to driving across all towns and cities.
I think its about time we stop talking about the US as a developed nation. It really isn’t for a majority of americans, and it does appear to be steadily devolving. It’s maybe not yet a fully fledged 'poor country" but it is way more of a shithole than I would suppose 80% of countries in the developing world. And the fact that do many Americans think they’re the greatest country since sliced bread came around is something I find bemusing
Nice one dude! Very original! America bad!
are you saying america isn’t catastrophically bad?
I’m not sure you guys understand what catastrophically means. And I think the problem is we have a bunch of folks who don’t live here, who only get their news from the comments of Lemmy posts, and they go and opine from there on the state of America as a whole.
I live in New Jersey. Things are pretty good. We’re not without problems, cost of living is a bit high, coats for utilities have been going up. Not great. We also have the best education in the country, one of the safest places to live. I have access to everything. I live in a town where I can walk anywhere, including to the train station.
It’s just this constant homogenization of America. The country was founded on this whole states rights idea, and every state tends to operate a little differently. The northeast corridor of the US is a fantastic place to live. The gulf (of Mexico) coast? I have no idea, never lived there, but from what I hear and read, it’s not for me.
And yeah, this administration is terrible. There’s fortunately some modicum of buffering that living in a good state provides. It’s not perfect. It is not catastrophically bad, not even close. We have elections currently ongoing. I have hope that the elections will swing things to the left.
Now, if some games get played with the elections, then I’ll adjust my thinking. Everyone here seems to think it’s a foregone conclusion, but I’m not there yet. Lemmy and reddit are bordering on the same cult status maga has, but I happen to agree with most of what they think so it’s okay. I do think each community tends toward hysteria first.
Simply because this statistic is not getting better does not mean that the United States is not a developed country. It means it is something to be addressed.
Many other statistics have the US improving rapidly e.g. crime, murder, life expectancy, and drug deaths. United States is also home to several vision zero cities which are actively improving this statistic.
Hostile, selfish, and distracted drivers
The drivers are a constant. This is a symptom of regulatory capture.
The cars are not the same. This is a consequence of regulatory failure, though.
You can call it failure, but it’s serving someone that engineered it. This isn’t merely a failure to act or an unforeseen consequence, intentional choices have been made that knowingly trade human well-being for commercial interests. This is government serving capital interests before humanity or its own citizens.
I say it’s specifically regulatory capture because of the way one regulatory body is defeating protections provided by another one. The dangerous and popular class of vehicles exist to thwart regulations that apply to what was previously considered normal-sized vehicles. If they could they would have just done away with the regulations, but they are limited to their captured offices’ authority.
Sure, it is a failure from the perspective of public interest. It isn’t an accident.
Feel like this will not be a popular take here, but hear me out: I blame safety regs. Crash test standards ensconce drivers deep within a dense cage of beefy reinforced pillars and crumple zones, while “driver assists” make them complacent and disengaged. Modern people movers have worse visibility than an old farm truck and massive touchscreens you have to use to operate the windshield wipers. Peak car was like a quarter century ago, bring back the 1994 Honda Civic. The hatch specifically, that thing was dope. At least you’d notice if you hit someone in one of those
You do know that all the other countries have the same issues you just mentioned, and there, the numbers are going down rather than up.
Edit: I guess they’ve been going up in Europe after COVID as well.
There are still too many people who forgot how to drive during pandemic.
For example, just the other day my dog was almost murdered because some idiot came zooming around the bend and “stopped” well past the crosswalk we were in. At an all-way stop sign. With cars already stopped.
Just for a better understanding, it would ve interested to see how the share of pedestrians developed in that time. Did decrease, remain similar or even increase?
Isn’t this largely to do with American car safety standards focusing only on the occupants of the car, rather than both the occupants and other people? Isn’t the Cybertruck rated as one of the safest vehicles by US standards but is considered to dangerous to be driven on most European roads for this reason?
There is no evaluation of the Cybertruck in the EU, but your general description is not entirely wrong. Tesla never even tried to make that ztash can street legal in the EU, knowing that their front facing stainless steel blades have no chance because they are insane from a pedestrian safety perspective and their are rules that forbid that.
Safety authorities and regulators in the US obviously don’t care much about the life of pedestrians. If they did, the Cyvertruck would not be street legal in its current form.
Paywall
US is really crushing it!
US is crushing something. Pedestrians and cyclists, it seems.
It’s interesting to me that Italians have such a terrible reputation for being dangerous on the roads, and even at the start of the graph period they had lower pedestrian fatalities than the USA.
It IS that bad. However, when compared to the US, there are safety measures in place here that allow us to survive even if the drivers are awful.
To be fair, it’s anecdotical, but considering the amount of craziness I see every day in my city, i’m amazed at the low amount of deaths.
That reputation is understated, but I think it’s still a more walkable country in general.
I remember when roundabouts started to proliferate in the last 10-15 years and how there’s an uproar every time a town builds a new one… but clearly it’s an imperative to design roads in a way that is deliberately inconvenient and forces carbrains to fucking pay attention.
I see roundabouts as a mixed thing. For many car oriented places they are indeed a much better design. They can be made ok for pedestrians but especially without traffic lights (or on streets with very light or very slow traffic) they tend to be more dangerous as many car drivers exiting round abouts are appearing quite suddenly and are often too fast, even if there is a pedestrian crossing. Many round abouts don’t have priorty for pedestrian to start with. Ireland had a lot of absolutely terrible roundabouts for pedestrians at least a decade ago. I don’t know if it got any better. Lots of traffic, no priority for pedestrians, fairly high speeds. It always felt as if you had to run for your life when crossing the road there.
As someone without a car in the US, I am obviously pro-urban pedestrian infrastructure. We need more and better busses, and far more walking / biking options that keep us away from cars entirely. If you can’t walk from any one place to any other in a city, that’s two or more cities in a trench coat, you know?
I do wonder what a graph of average driven hours would do to this chart. Per 100,000 people of course shows more are dying per person. But if US citizens drive twice the total hours(completely made up number) as those in other countries, then we would actually have less pedestrian deaths per driven hour no?
While I do agree that we probably have less “per hour driven” I think this metric is important because it still reflects the danger to the average person. If I get hit by a car it’s not going to make me feel any better to know “that person was driving for a really long time before they hit you”.
Factually it’s an interesting metric. But it doesn’t make pedestrians feel any safer
per hours driven our per km driven is a car centric misleading number for many purposes. That is because car centric planning increases the distances one needs to drive, without creating additional value. Going to the supermarket doesn’t get any better just because the supermarket is double as far away. So the per 100,000 people number is a better representation.
Of course, people having to drive longer and further also means higher risk of deaths and accidents but that is just a compounding issue caused by car centric design itself. It is part of the problem, not some externalised factor that should be compensated for.
On the other hand, the US has far fewer people walking around than those other countries, and this is per capita, not per 100k pedestrians
Sidebar, what’s up with the data unavailable and then the data on the graph?
Looks like it’s just 2024 specifically that’s unavailable for Germany and UK.
The data is a snip straight from the Wall Street Journal. I provided the link.
But why increasing over the prior period? I have a theory you’re not going to like.
Demands for safer (for vehicle occupants), and more aerodynamic profiles, lead to giant angled framing in the cabin that sits exactly in the worst place to create a blind spot for pedestrians.
If it’s going to increase you have to blame something that changed.
