What the hell happened around 2010? Smartphones?
What the hell happened around 2010? Smartphones?
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Phones may be a factor, but since this seems to be a uniquely North American problem, I’d look toward the vehicles themselves: People have always been distracted while walking, but hood heights have increased dramatically in recent years.
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The drivers being on their phones is a major contributor, I'd imagine
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Car manufacturers skirting emissions regulations by selling "work trucks" instead of regular cars.
The increased size of these trucks directly causes more fatalities
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"Why is this happening" asks car obsessed, SUV infested country.
Compare with similar data in other countries and you'll see the issue is not smartphones, and likely has more to do with your huge cars.
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There are probably several factors. I doubt there are as many people using a smartphone while driving in other countries. If someone wants to sit on their phone while commuting elsewhere, they can walk or take the train/bus/subway. In the US, you have to drive no matter what
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Counterpoint, I wonder how much American culture makes people more willing to be in their phone while their vehicle is moving. The toxic work culture, the disregard for others, and so on likely contributes to a higher use of phone at dangerous times. Especially since larger cars are more about lethality.
What other developed countries have a 60+ hour work week in this day and age?
Edit: thought of a few in Asia but they all have public transportation so they can safely have their 1 hour "me time" commute. If Americans wanna play their mobile games to relax they have to do it in a car, oof.
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60+ hour work week
You honestly believe that about America?
I haven't worked 60 hours a week for over 20 years, and I was a contractor then, my time, my money. I've never met anyone that works 60 hour weeks, and no employer is paying that overtime. Maybe if you're on salary at some insane tech startup? Maybe 2-3 people at my last gig (software dev) worked hours like that, but that was because they loved what they were doing. And HR frowned on that.
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I vaguelly remember reading how SUVs are 70% more deadly in collisions with pedestrians than conventional cars.
(Because their front is flatter and taller, so pedestrians are less likelly to roll over the hood and instead tend to be projected away)
I believe those kinds of cars started taking off back then.
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People buy SUVs because "safer" but they kill more pedestrians - and they're not strictly safer for occupants either. Big SUVs have rollover risk. Crossovers aren't necessarily any safer in a collision because it turns out that what really matters is the "area" of the car (length x width) and since crossovers and SUVs often cost more, you end up getting a smaller vehicle by area for the same amount of money. You literally get less for your money and it's also less fun to drive and probably requires more fuel. I honestly don't see why people without back issues get crossovers over wagons.
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I am mostly in agreement with you but why would the area of the car matter? You can potentially have bigger crumple zones, but that'd exclude the space that is used for passengers. Other than that, the energy transferred in a collision is relative to the mass, where the lighter vehicle receives a larger proportion of the energy than the heavier one.
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A crossover is the worst of both worlds
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I just checked the data for Germany and it doesn't reflect the same trend. Could be that Germany is more pedestrian friendly. There is no upwards trend visible from 2007, when smartphones became mainstream. But, you can see a clear drop in pedestrian
deathsaccidents caused by traffic during the pandemic.Edit: Little mistake from me, this statistic shows pedestrian accidents, not deaths. Still comparable though.
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Why is this graph sideways
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I guess Germany isn't as much into SUVs
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What in the ever living abscissa is this graph?
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Could also be a mentality thing, if you can mentally put down the phone and not text. Or hell an automatic/manual transmission thing, can't use the phone if you have to shift.
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[https://www.statista.com/statistics/199980/us-truck-sales-since-1951/](If anyone is searching for an answer why.) Funny how it is almost the same curve.
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Truck sales were increasing until about 2007 but road deaths only rose since ~2010. So I think it is clearly different curves.
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2007/8 financial crisis had gas spike up to $5-8/gal in some instances. This caused a lot of people to sell their SUVs and get more economical vehicles.
In the mid 2010's, gas prices came down substantially, and everyone bought more SUVs and traded in their economic vehicles.
SUVs kill pedestrians like bug zappers kill mosquitos on a damp, hot night in the swamp.
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Drop starts in 1980, which was before SUVs, and after introduction of SUVs and popularity increase, kept dropping. I prefer the phone explanation, but don't know why it started dropping in 1980. Maybe exodus to suburbs, and no pedestrians in suburbs?
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I believe you might be trying to apply logic to the dates assuming there's only one or two variables changing across all those decades. The truth is there are multiple strongly correlated reasons pedestrian deaths declined sharply in the US over the years.
In the 1980's and 90's it was largely the safety standards being improved in vehicles. ABS being standard helped with stopping before hitting people. Road safety standards and road designs improved to allow for more pedestrian walkways away from the streets. Automatic headlights at night turning on, better road conditions, better tires were introduced to handle different weather patterns more easily (e.g. in the rain or snow where traction loss could lead to pedestrian deaths) as well as standards to increase vehicle inspections and what safety standards were being checked during those inspections.
In the 2000's, while many safety standards were still being improved and tweaked, a lot of the impactful ones had already been instituted, so the changes were less and less dramatic over the last 20ish years.
The specific question the OP was asking for was around the 2010 drop, and that is strongly correlated with high gas prices leading to sell-offs of SUVs, and SUVs are the leading cause of pedestrian deaths by far with modern cars with modern safety standards. Largely for the reasons others in this post have mentioned (larger, heavier, hood height, etc.).
I was very much a car nut during those years, and the gas prices drove many, many people to trade in their SUVs, trucks, etc. that had poor gas mileage. Gas prices were nuts, and a huge shock to everyone's budget when it jumped up suddenly. This wasn't really an inflationary thing, this was caused by a multitude of factors, but it stayed high for a long time due to those conditions.
When those conditions reverted, gas prices started falling like a rock, and everyone went back to thinking: "well, maybe I can afford that SUV again". And they did. SUV sales rose sharply once gas prices fell. So pedestrian deaths have gone back up as a result.
Today, it's also multiple factors, with the vehicle type being one of the large ones (hood height has been linked as a giant increase in the liklihood a pedestrian dies in a collision), but the other factor that rose sharply was smartphone use while driving from about the mid 2010's to today. It's probably the leading cause of vehicular deaths in general (I haven't checked, but I'd throw $20 at it being distracted drivers).
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We children of the 80s were out there in them streets, walking and biking to our friends' houses and dodging the cars. Over the years our skills grew, and the numbers were finally on our side. And while it was sad on the rare occasion that we lost a friend to the streets as if they were an Oregon Trail character, it did help the numbers even more!
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Not just smartphones, dashboards with flat touchscreens. Now, you have to look at the dashboard. Prior, you manipulated all the controls by touch.
Honestly though, I don’t understand the smartphone thing. Set your playlist, book, podcast and go. Leave if alone until you park. Why is that hard?
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I'm with you. Maybe I'm getting old, but I still treat texting/messaging as asynchronous communication. It's not a "live" conversation, and if I'm driving or doing something else in between messages, then it's going to be a bit before I can respond again.
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It's hard because people are addicted to their phones. Tech companies have spent billions making social media as addictive as possible. Americans also have no other choice of transportation. If you want to go somewhere, you generally must drive
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Again, I don’t get it. For starters, driving is a great time to reset and decompress. More than simply walking through a doorway. It’s time to purge your brain of anything sordid in your day, like work. Distance happens, physically and mentally.
You leave work, there’s a good book, or good music, you, and the road. Why would you let calls or texts interrupt that?
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I get a bit annoyed if I tell someone I'm driving to them, they text me while they know I'm driving, and they get upset with me if I don't answer before I get there.
I am driving! That takes my full attention. Agh.
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My brother got his drivers license that year.....
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How many more must die for his bloodlust to be satisfied!?
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- People walking into live traffic while texting.
- People driving while texting.
- Police doing fuck all about it.
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While those are all contributing factors, I'd argue cars getting bigger has added two additional major factors:
- Impacts are far more likely to be deadly due to the higher hood height knocking the victim to the asphalt/concrete, rather than them going over the hood
- Higher hood heights have far less visibility, giving less time to react, if the driver sees the victim at all
Combine that with people generally being distracted by smartphones, and we get the current situation
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I'd assume that also cars having higher performance (power? What's even the correct expression here?), as in quicker accelerations even after a full stop plays a role. Someone walking over a red light for pedestrians probably wouldn't get hit fatally by most 2000s cars, but by a more modern car. EVs also have absurd accelerations.
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Why does every graph in this thread have a fetish of not starting at 0.
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The size of cars exploded and bigger cars are less safe for pedestrians.
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that's also about the time "infotainment" systems started becoming common if not mandatory in cars. My 2003 S10 has physical switches for all of its controls, I can set the clock by feel. Newer cars with touch screen interfaces take drivers' eyes off the road more than cars used to.
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Thanks Obama
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Trucks which are the most popular vehicles in the US got taller in the front
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I've not seen people mention what probably is the actual case: the US government failing to handle the big changes in traffic like phone usage, change of vehicles sold, etc..
Different countries handled similar changes appropriately and deaths decreased, while the vehicle centric US did nothing to protect pedestrians/cyclists/...
The government, probably under influence from industry, is 100% to blame.
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Yes.
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Lifted trucks were popular as far back as the 80s (remember Back to the Future? And that thing was from the factory...).
This is definitely a smartphone thing, and a little bit a car touchscreen thing.
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While they certainly had some popularity, as you said enough to feature in bttf, and people remember obsessions with trucks like Bigfoot, generally it was still a more narrow niche.
Sedans, station wagons, sports cars were all pretty popular. Even the first big family vehicles were minivans that tended to have lower noses. The trucks of the time were downright sane compared to the modern mandate of trucks cosplaying as semis.
The 90s saw the rise of the suv.
But yeah, the critical factor for that timeframe in the chart would seem to be touch screen phones.
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The front of Marty's truck came up to just above his waist. Michael J Fox is 5'4" tall. The front of a lot of modern trucks, from the factory, come up almost to my shoulders. I am 5'8" tall.
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thought I was in fuckcars with all these comments.
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First time on Lemmy?
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Apropos of nothing, but yesterday I saw a guy in a lifted pick-up truck two thumb type during a fucking zipper merge. Who needs eyes to drive, anyway?
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I bet a big part of this is the opioid crisis. Lots of people driving high as fuck.
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maybe?
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Neither Germany (other comment) nor UK show such a trend, both keep going down.
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LED headlights that blind everybody in front of them
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Caylynn got her license.
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2010 was the year after Michael Jackson & Farrah Fawcett died, so in 2010 there were no pedestrians anywhere because everyone stayed home or drove cars or rode buses.
/bullshit
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We lost the headphone jack. Jk
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Wearing headphones awhile you drive is dangerous.
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Thanks Obama
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When did Pokémon go come out?
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2016
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Maybe that's when someone cut the lower half of the graph?
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Thanks Obama!
/s
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Teaching people that pedestrians have the right of way is partially to blame. I can't tell you how many times I have seen people just step into traffic without looking because they know the car is required to stop. There was a teenage girl in my community who stepped in front of two lanes of cars just as their light turned green and a guy in the passing lane came barreling down the hill through the green light and hit her because he didn't see her in front of the lane she forced to stop until he was under the light. Another thing is people walking FACING traffic. If you are facing traffic and a car is pulling out to turn right from a road or driveway, their focus is looking for an opening on their left. I have witnessed two bike accidents because they were facing traffic and pulled in front of cars turning right while looking to their left.
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Yep, people started to walk around staring down at their phones.
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Of course that must be the issue, and only in the USA, not in Germany or the UK. I assume they do not have money to buy phones there.
Or... is it actually that key difference between these countries: The types of cars and generally the infrastructure around pedestrians?
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if only things could cause/be caused by multiple factors at once...
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Also giant lifted trucks
Everything is an SUV now
Even my wrx is a SUV now
It's true. The Ford mustang suv is an abomination
SUV's were in before 2010 though.