Article ignores it, but looking at the source data you can see pedestrian deaths were flat, then a large spike in 2020 during Covid, and now we are at a new higher plateau. Cause is not a change in roads, or cars, or more SUVs. Covid/lockdowns changed the way people drive. Less civility, less police enforcement, more chaos. Driving is noticeably worse and more stressful than pre-Covid.
What happened in 2014 was Ferguson, followed by the Ferguson Report, and the initial stages of changes in enforcement. Then in 2020 we had Floyd and an even larger pullback.
Roads did not change. Phones had been around for years by 2016. SUVs had been gaining in popularity for literally decades. It's not dispositive, but the only thing that fits the timing perfectly are the changes in policing after 2014 and 2020.
Police in some cities have almost completely stopped doing traffic enforcement. San Francisco, for example, used to issue something like 12k citations per month. Now they issue just a couple hundred. The change started right after the Ferguson Report was released:
Other cities have done the same. Police didn't just back off. They practically stopped enforcement altogether. We're talking about 95% drops in enforcement in some places.
You are really cherry picking to come to that conclusion, but if citations correlates that strongly to less accidents that should be easy to show. It can not be the only thing though.
Remember what we're trying to explain here: two distinct step-ups in pedestrian fatalities occurring in just one country. Any proposed explanation needs to address both 1) why it happened when it did; and 2) why it happened in only that one country.
Cars are getting bigger everywhere and have been for decades, so that fails both tests. COVID only happened in 2020 and it happened everywhere, so that fails both tests. Smart phones were introduced in 2007 and they're available everywhere, so that fails both tests.
But "U.S. police departments drastically reduced both the number of traffic stops performed and the total number of citations issued starting just after the Ferguson Report in 2015" is practically slapping you in the face.
As I said, it's not dispositive, but I can't see any reason to reject it (that's not political in nature).
You are postfixing your post saying that this "evidence" is not enough to support you case on its own. My point is that it is even worse.
You miss everything that disproves your opinion. The graph does not support your argumentation at all, there is too much noise. You need to explain how citations affect accidents. We fired most of our traffic cops in the eighties here, the number of citations plumeted. The number of deaths are on a steady decline.
> You need to explain how citations affect accidents.
No, I don't. You're plainly demanding a standard of evidence that you wouldn't in any other domain, especially if you were inclined to prefer the explanation. I'm going to take "citations affect driver behavior" as axiomatic, unless you can disprove it. I'm not going to wait until we have 100 studies to confirm that a commonsense mechanism does indeed function in the most parsimoniously explained way.
We have to act in the world.
We don't have 100 years to figure out if ticketing drivers affects their behavior to some ridiculous standard of evidence you invented just now because you would prefer that explanation weren't true.
People really need to stop allowing themselves to be held hostage to this kind of special pleading.
I was sort of curious about whether or not other non-pedestrian motor vehicle fatalities also increased and came across an interesting stat. It looks like overall passenger vehicle occupant fatalities have also increased [1] and, interestingly enough, some of this is probably a result of a lower rate of seat belt usage among those fatally injured [2]. All of this coinciding with Covid.
There’s a growing sense of anger in literally almost everyone I know.
Somewhere on the way, people have become more misanthropic, close-minded, and angry. I’m not sure why.
I think it is social media and the enshittification of all these services? Also, the rise of authoritarianism in America and abroad may contribute to this? Regardless, more and more I see people living in a fantasy world where people both “suck immeasurably” and (strangely) have no freewill or agency and are just meat robots.
I think these two things together are really pernicious.
It's really easy to explain? If you are conservative you think the world is going upside down with people just allowed to say they are whatever and you think that trans people are all degenerates or stupid and need to shut up and go away. You likely think that the 2020 election was LITERALLY rigged, and you believe that someone was shot in a peaceful protest at the capitol building. You believe all democrats are molesting children regularly, that they killed Epstein and covered it up. You believe that caravans of gang members are driven across the border regularly, and that democrats want to allow them to just walk into the country, collect benefits without working, yet also steal all the jobs. There's a million more things you are mad about, and you think we pay too much attention to the problems of black people.
If you are progressive, you think the world is warming up and imminent horrors are on the horizon, you see a class structure designed to keep you poor, you will never own anything more expensive than a cup of coffee, you see your friends and loved ones being physically harmed by individuals, and structurally harmed by the state itself for the way they were born, for no clear reason. You see women quite literally dying because doctors cannot legally protect them from a dead fetus. A few rich people have strong say on basically everything that happens in your life, and they are all bitching and moaning that their life is so hard. Meanwhile, all your conservative relatives are screaming that this is a liberal hoax, basic science is a liberal hoax, trans people are a threat, and that democrats deserve death.
People are living in two entirely separate realities and it doesn't matter that only one is closer to actual reality if the people in the other just don't care.
I mean, I agree with what you’re saying… but then again, they aren’t living in 2 different realities. As far as I am aware, there’s still only one reality.
Just because some (potentially most) of these people are delusional doesn’t mean that reality is different for them, just the framework they’re living in doesn’t match objective reality.
And part of all this delusion is a belief that a great many people are idiots, assholes, and irredeemable. That propaganda atomizes us.
The general state of the global economy, late-stage capitalism fucking everyone who isn't a literal millionaire over, climate change, general political instability, the mentioned rise of authoritarianism, etc. All of those are vastly more influential than "social media, enshittification thereof".
They may well go hand in hand. Through social media we are all bombarded with messages about how fucking terrible everything is on a daily basis. Unless you are incredibly selective about your social media usage, you can't spend 10 minutes on a platform without seeing some kind of stressful or depressing or outrage-inducing news.
It used to just be home-bodies and elderly people who sat in front of news programs all day, but now it's all of us. Bad news generates clicks, and there's plenty to be found.
The roads were wide open for 2+ years, people got used to driving very fast and not really paying attention to their surroundings because there wasn't much other traffic to start with. People started running red lights because not other traffic to wait on. You could drive recklessly without much risk. Now people are still driving recklessly but have a lot more cars and activity around them.
One thing that I've noticed is people moved to a suburb or took a new job that was a reasonable commute at the time. Now that traffic came back, it's not a reasonable commute anymore so they're trying to drive like crazy to get back and forth.
By definition this should be a very small subset of drivers, since before as you claim 'roads were empty'. If most drivers stayed at home they should not got those bad habits.
Very surreal this discussion, very US specific too. Here in Europe, in past 3 years tons of new cycling infrastructure, either wider roads or parts of roads taken from cars and given to cyclists (ie 1 lane instead of 2 lane roads). The goal isn't to move traffic asap, but rather make coming into cities as annoying as possible, so key intersections have in incoming directions green light ie for 10 seconds.
And no, not seeing any increase in aggression neither. But then again Europe is massive and culturally extremely diverse, and I haven't visited more than 10 countries in past 3 years so somewhere this may be valid, but its not an overall trend.
Frequency of driving was reduced but when you did drive, the roads were empty. The people who did continue to drive daily was not insignificant (maybe 10-30% of people, guessing IDK) and may be the ones creating the problems. Eg. in heavy traffic if 5% of vehicles are driving reckless, it's bad.
Strong +1 on this -- in DC I've noticed people driving incredibly recklessly because there is little enforcement (both at the ticketing level and at the making you pay up for the ticket level). It's even gotten to the point where people don't update their tags because they won't be fined for it.
The "defund the police" movement that happened just before Covid has contributed to police pulling back enforcement of all sorts of things.
Also, many cities have a "no chase" rule for police now because of high-profile crashes which killed people. Guessing the lawsuit payouts were large and contributed to the decisions.
I think people realized there are no consequences so decided to do what the heck they wanted.
Here in Florida the cops are complete dead weight, they used to enforce DUIs religiously Friday / Saturday night. Now you will barely see anyone pulled over and definitely a marked increase in suspected DUI drivers in the early hours (2-4am).
We literally have people planning open street races and shut downs on Facebook groups, and the cops do absolutely nothing.
Side shows in the Bay Area are incredibly common now and sometimes, in the middle of the night, go on for an hour or more. In the summer, I can hear them miles away, due to the still air and open windows. It's nuts. And, when I drive around town, you can see the tire tracks in the middle of intersections, marking where the side shows were. Dozens of places in the areas I drive, which isn't far or often.
> The "defund the police" movement that happened just before Covid has contributed to police pulling back enforcement of all sorts of things.
How? That movement failed and police have more funding now. If you're paying them more and they're doing less that's a problem between y'all. You got what you wanted you don't also get to blame us.
I suspect that a movement that took the 'ACAB' slogan mainstream did a pretty good job of demoralising the police, though, leaving them less effective even with increased funding. Why should they risk their lives for a society that hates them?
They should do the job they get paid to do. Insisting we also adore them for it seems pretty precious. No one made them be a police. Barring the anomaly of the post sept-11 US it has always been an unpopular job.
The "risk their life for" thing I don't even want to get into but here we go. Most of the risk is the normal health damage and accident risk of being in a car all day, and it's comparably dangerous to other jobs where you're in a car all day. Statistically in a police encounter, the lives most at risk are any but the officers'. And were you not here for Uvalde or what?
> Why should they risk their lives for a society that hates them?
Ideally because they are paid to do so, and voluntarily sel-selected into a job that requires such. Nobody is forcing anybody to be a cop. But every citizen has a responsibility to hold their public servants accountable for their (again, self-selected) responsibilities.
"oh the poor poor police with zero accountability for literal crimes we have on camera, won't somebody think about their poooooooor situation"?
Come back to me when I can just refuse to do my literal, contractual job and have the supreme court rule that it's fine, and I won't even get a negative mark on my record.
It coincides with the general rise in anti-social behavior that happened during and after lockdowns.
There's definitely a lot of people reporting a change in driving attitudes. During covid, people went fucking nuts. There for a while, it was a source of local news articles.
I dont have an answer for why. Just it has. I live in a major city in the midwest and its wild how often I see people drive with zero regard for anyone else.
Running red lights and almost hitting someone, cutting people off, swerving in traffic erratically to be faster. Its honestly scary some days.
My anecdote is remarkably similar. I worked from home for a couple months, then had to mask up for a couple of service calls on essential production lines... There was a massive step function between late February in 2020 and May 2020 on the roads from Michigan to Indiana and back. Coworkers and customers who told me they used to go 79mph in the left lane (because it was unlikely to earn a cheap 2-point ticket instead of 81+ which was a more probable and more expensive 4-point ticket) but now bragged about driving 90+ or hitting "triple digits". It was kind of like talking to a religious fundamentalist who can't understand how unbelievers restrain themselves without the Ten Commandments and threat of torture in the afterlife providing consequences for theft, murder, and adultery. I've never gotten a ticket and had no idea what the penalties were, the legal consequences were never a part of my reason for not driving unsafely.
Speed limits and traffic enforcement had been fully suspended, and people drove however they wanted to. It also felt like there was some griping about being part of the unlucky few who had to risk their lives for the sake of those who got to stay home in safety and comfort with all their necessities delivered.
My brother-in-law's laughing response to my description of my service call drive is etched in my memory. He'd been massively busy delivering pizzas, and after hearing about how I'd had my doors blown off, he said "Welcome to the apocalypse, we drive fast now!"
I'm acutely aware of it as a bike commuter. It has saved my neck on a few occasions in the past three years since I have adopted the assumption that everyone in a vehicle is intentionally trying to kill me.
It seems like it's a combo of impatience + lapses in attention more than anything else, but something has to be fueling it because it is consistently worse now than it has ever been in my 15 years of biking for transport. Pre-emptive braking with the right of way has saved my ass more times that I can count.
I can't believe we are blaming this ENTIRELY on drivers... with people in the comments even claiming that the quality of drivers has gone done because work from home has put more poor people on the road.
Just look at the pedestrians you pass on your next drive. Count how many of them are looking at their phone while walking. I just did this and it was 4/10. I think Pedestrian behavior and awareness *might be a little different than it was 40 years ago as well.
We're blaming drivers because it's a core responsibility of driving to not injure or kill people with your vehicle.
There's no corresponding responsibility inherent in walking. In fact many people who walk also have other statuses or impairments that prevent them from fully perceiving the world they are walking through, such as blindness or being a child.
It is the driver's obligation to ensure the safety of the people around which they choose to operate their vehicle, regardless of their awareness or behavior.
If you are worried that a pedestrian might step in front of your car, then the onus is upon you to drive even slower than you already are. The speed limit is a maximum in urban environments. You're free to go slower, if that's what's required, and by your own admission it seems to be.
Yes people glance at their phone while walking. Just like drivers glance at their phone while driving (or fiddle with those stupid touch-screens that are ubiquitous now).
But just like there aren't many drivers who would stare intently at their phone while driving through a busy intersection, there aren't many pedestrians that will stare intently at a phone while crossing a busy street. It's simple self-perservation.
Also, phones have been around for ages now. Pedestrians are being hit and killed at a higher rate since the pandemic started, not since the wide adoption of cellphone technology.
Look at pedestrians? Look at drivers. Many many drivers will text, talk, or use their phones constantly. Considering that the driver is the one operating the dangerous machine, their attentiveness is much more important
Edit: My point isn't to argue about all the studies listed, this is just why I think brain damage is a plausible reason for the population-wide decrease in car driving skill.
You have criminals getting out on low or no bond in higher numbers. You have serious issues with felony bond violations as well. You have reduced police enforcement. Your typical felon doesn’t car as much about traffic laws.
It has changed the population of drivers on the road. Wealthy, highly educated professionals are driving less because they work at home more. "Essential workers" are driving as much or more. They are biased toward poorer and less educated people, who are also as a population worse drivers with worse vehicles compared to the population staying at home. These shifts in driver population are more than enough to account for the change.
A proposal that I haven't seen discussed in other responses:
COVID lockdowns saw a rise in home delivery services. The drivers in this gig economy are financially incentivized to go fast. Lockdowns initially enabled them to go fast, and, once the expectation was in place, it's hard to roll back.
(just my opinion, I don't have data point to back it up, curious if anyone who participate as a delivery driver could confirm/deny).
The rise in traffic deaths coincides with laws passed that allow drivers to kill pedestrians if they feel threatened by them. Both this, and the charged language used by politicians on this topic, will most likely play part in this increase. Social and political backing for your fear usually doesn't help reduce it.
The poster is most likely referring to laws like those in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis's "anti-riot" bill, which was passed but eventually found unconstitutional. It gave civil protection to anyone who ran over protesters with a vehicle. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt also signed such a bill, House Bill 1674 in 2021, which says that people who run over protesters if they "feel threatened" can't be held civilly or criminally liable. North Dakota (HB 1203), North Carolina (HB 330), Florida, Tennessee, Rhode Island, and Texas also proposed similar bills. It is worth noting that several of the bills do say that if a driver wilfully runs over a protester, it's not ok, though language varies.
Pedestrian deaths aren't evenly distributed, they concentrate among the elderly, disabled, and impoverished.
Our covid response forced us to make explicit some parts of our social agreement that were not usually stated outright before. Covid deaths also concentrated among exactly those groups.
We established outright that harms to these groups are an acceptable cost for convenience to the rest. It's not a large leap for people to apply this to their driving behavior, even unconsciously.
There is also the fact that covid isn't the only thing that happened in 2020. Since that summer's protests the police in my city have been on open but unacknowledged soft strike. They only take actions that are personally fulfilling to them individually, which certainly isn't traffic enforcement.
This is certainly true. The number of red light runners in the Bay Area has skyrocketed, but not only that, the number of people driving fast and running red lights has gone way up, too. It feels like chaos out there.
I have been seeing people drive the opposite way on a highway on the shoulder of the road to not sit in traffic. I have seen this many times in the past few years and never saw such flagrant dangerous selfish (in terms of no regards for societal laws) behavior before.
I have seen a car slow down and reverse in one of the inner lanes, because they missed the exit. This was at night in Milano. There was almost no traffic, we passed them from the innermost lane, but there were 2 more lanes to them to the right, all empty.
I'm pretty critical of police forces -- but my experience living in Charlotte NC for the past 8 years leads me to believe that police enforcement is at least a part of the equation.
We had a pretty large step-back in traffic enforcement [1][2] starting in 2019. Since the pandemic, traffic around the city has taken on a decidedly Mad-Max vibe. _Every_ time I drive, I see red lights get run. Most times I get on the interstate I see people passing on the shoulder. _Every_ time I get on the interstate I see people driving recklessly fast. Not high-speed flow-of-traffic fast, but 20-30 mph faster than traffic, weaving in and out of traffic without using indicators. Uptown residents have been complaining about the regular street-racing incidents since 2020.
I'm confident there are other factors, and I know not every city has the same problems as Charlotte. But for sure the fact that the police have just stopped enforcing most of the traffic laws has played a part.
Why? In San Francisco the number of traffic citations issued has fallen to essentially zero. The cops are on strike and no longer perceive any marginal benefit from doing their jobs. They get paid either way.
There are more plausible explanations that have been extensively studied, like cars getting bigger. Where are the data showing a causal relationship between police enforcement of traffic laws over the past three years and increased pedestrian deaths? Do we even have indirect data, e.g. Sun Belt traffic enforcement declining more than in other states?
Not sure, and those are all good avenues for exploration. But it doesn’t look to me as if vehicle size, power, and weight can have caused the sudden increase because that happened over 20 years.
I personally don't think its "police enforcement" but I would wager a large % of deaths (at least in New Mexico, the state with the highest rate) are from panhandlers in the street. IIRC, they're trying to make new laws to prevent ppl from standing in the middle of the road.
