Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Nothing resembling this pattern has occurred in other comparably wealthy countries.
I’ve seen a lot of people wearing all dark clothing at night while walking their dog or jogging. I was told growing up not to do that. I guess they don’t teach that anymore?
People do that here and get really annoyed when they step off the curb into 30mph traffic and tires squeal and people narrowly avoid hitting them, lol. Meanwhile, I either wait until the car is past, or make direct eye contact with the driver while I'm under a streetlight. Sometimes wear bright colors too.
One of these days, someone is gonna get plowed over by the 80,000,000 lb electric streetcar, which cannot stop as quickly. People on bikes and scooters always run the red lights too, adding to the problem, despite there being red lights specifically for bikes so that people don't get struck. It's a mess. We need gates to keep people out of harms way :P
Cool victim blaming
It'd be victim blaming if people were intentionally running over people in dark clothing. When talking about victim blaming you're generally talking about the intent of the perpetrator, not the general circumstances. "She was dressed all sexy like and made him rape her" and such. It's an excuse for agency, rather than lack of agency.
Wearing dark clothes in poorly lit high traffic areas makes you harder to see, and harder to avoid. Drivers can not act on information they do not have, so they have less agency to avoid those pedestrians.
Night is when the sun is on the other side of the planet. Night is dark
But is night becoming darker since 2010?
Yes
Is always darker before the dawn
Interesting article. I skimmed it so maybe I missed this, but my first thought was that the population is aging, and older people have more trouble driving at night. I'm 60 and I am definitely impaired at night, so I avoid driving after dark if at all possible.
I haven't read it yet, but the first thing I noticed was the graph starts heading upward just after the 2008 financial crisis. More people working extra or odd shifts, more people doing without cars, more people driving tired and stressed ...
A second and better thought: it's the US obsession with ever-increasing
penis substitutesSUV and truck sizes. With a smaller vehicle, when you get hit, you roll over the hood and off to the side. With a bigger vehicle, you go underneath, run over by a much heavier vehicles, she potentially dragged. There are also bigger blind spots and, from my experience driving near matter SUVs and pickups, their drivers are often just right fucking oblivious to the outside world, or fucking entitled, driving like they own the road and everyone else is obligated to get out of their way.@athos77 this seems like the most plausible explanation.
Post GFC funding cuts to enforcement of drunk driving laws might be a related factor.
We have no infrastructure in place for pedestrians across most of the US. Combine that with laws on land ownership ranging from arresting trespassers to shooting them on sight, the only legal place to walk is usually a road. And even then that’s a stretch.
Archived link: https://archive.ph/7mfli
Archive always thinks I'm a robot. I check the box as not a robot, complete the captcha and then it just repeats the process. Must be my privacy settings. Anyways, thanks for linking.
Because there's no longer anything interesting on TV.