It's quite obvious that the increased pedestrian fatalities come form increased homelessness, drug use and where homeless people live (often around highways). Even that quoted NYT article says "In 2021, 70 percent of Portland’s pedestrian fatalities were among the homeless." This seems like a big omission in Mr. Smith's argument.
Good point about obviousness. Also I have no clue about the rate, i.e. increase. It's just obvious to me in Tucson, where most pedestrians seem to be the homeless. And even when I commute on my bike, the major risk is hitting a shopping cart on the underpass bike path. Coupled with alarming charts about drug overdoses, that's where I would look first.
Tucson (and other cities in the desert Southwest) may be exceptional cases though, as the heat makes travelling on foot highly undesirable and thus the preserve of those bereft of other options.
I wonder if the US has a particular problem with discarded shopping carts because the US lacks a sufficiently valuable coin in widespread circulation to make the coin deposit system (ubiquitous in Europe) practical there? A euro coin is worth roughly 4 US quarters while a UK pound coin is worth roughly 5 quarters.
I thought they only had those carts in Moscow 🤣. It would be great to get rid of pennies and nickels and $1 bills and have $1 and $5 coins, but I don’t think that will stop shopping cart thefts, even the carts with the virtual fence and locking wheels get stolen. Maybe a better solution would be to put an AirTag like tracker on the carts and pay bigger bounties on returning them to the stores.
Do the pedestrian deaths include cyclists? There are a lot of cyclists in Tucson also, and most do not appear to be homeless. There are lots of bike lanes here, but lack of internal freeways and high boulevard speed limits makes them pretty high risk, so I stick to The Loop when cycling.
I commute mostly via the Loop. There, shopping carts are especially magical. As the homeless folks prefer the underbelly of bridges, that’s where the carts often are. Because the Loop goes down under the bridge, it is the spot where bicyclists go fastest. Next factor, it’s the darkest spot. Blinded by bright Tucson sun, and with dark sunglasses, it’s really dark down there, for those fast 5 seconds (I pedal 20 mph on regular path, 30 mph down under; yes, it’s dumb). And lastly, that part of the Loop is also one of the narrowest. So, sudden detection af a shopping cart freaks you out, and in that high speed, you try to avoid it, while not hitting another fast blind bicyclist in the opposite direction. Magical.
I've got a hunch that cultural stagnation has at least something to do with a fear of transgressing boundaries. Killing sacred cows and challenging the prevailing wisdom used to be at the forefront of culture and it's not anymore. There's a deep fear of cancel culture, so people in our cultural spaces tend to play it safe these days - at least in comparison to the 70s and 80s. Additionally, the cultural gatekeepers have themselves become highly intolerant, far less willing than they used to be to quickly champion rule breakers. Think of the Lower East Side Movement of the early 1980s - people went to jail for showing the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, a gay artist whose deeply beautiful photographs of flowers, objects and naked men were deeply controversial at the time. But museums and gallery owners risked showing his work. Today? Not sure they would.
I'd suggest high housing costs are another big factor behind cultural stagnation: they shrink the potential talent pool because "creative" careers are now way too big a risk for young people who don't have rich parents to help them out. Especially given that agglomeration effects are at least as important in the creative industries as in any other industries.
As the Blondie guitarist Chris Stein put it: "Everybody who helped add to the cachet of the city can’t live there anymore. The biggest shame is that everybody’s gotta have a job to live in the city now. There’s no time to make art. How can you keep your credibility if you have some stupid job you hate and still be a radical? I never had a job ever. I painted a bathroom once and that was it. I was in the band for 30 years.”
Chris just doesn’t consider playing guitar in a band to be a job, but if he’s getting paid that’s what it is. Punk/new wave/hiphop musicians maybe depended on cheap urban living to be creative, but with technology now anyone can become famous and make money on YouTube/TikTok/Twitch and can live out in the cheap boonies or Detroit without worrying about housing prices (which of course are artificially high in coastal urban areas because of restricted supply). I don’t think authors, filmmakers or tv shows have any limitations based on housing supply, authors can still crank out novels while living in a shack with a typewriter and whisky in the middle of nowhere, and movies usually require more costs for production and marketing (only recent profitable movie with a budget of under $50K I cam think of was Paranormal Activity in 2007) and studios and streamers are still gatekeepers, unless you count TikTokers or Mr. Beast as “TV shows”.
While UK formally has a ban on phoning while driving, this isn't enforced. The get out of using hands free kits has been researched to be almost as distracting. Current car design of screens out of drivers view encourages distraction. Road designs have improved road safety by slowing cars. The weight rise translates into potholes under the fourth power law.
Yes, I'm really unhappy with the concept of centrally located touch screens to control much of the car and provide information. This requires drivers to look away from the road more and more often, for longer periods. I"m concerned that when I finally buy another car, I won't be able to find one with a safe and truly functional interface such as my current car has.
This is so true. Both SUVs ownership and smartphone use is very high in the UK. Increased pedestrian traffic. With pedestrian deaths *decreasing* that means we can't just blame SUVs, smartphones: road safety can be tackled with many other ways: better driver and pedestrian education, road and pavement (sidewalk) design, and so on. It's just so easy to blame one technology or other, while throughout humanity we have always used some kind of technology and adapted our society to handle it (with varying degrees of success, obviously!)
I'm not saying this is the reason, but a huge number of people around me lift their pickups and SUVs onto larger tires than they came with. I'd say that percentage has increased in the last ten years. (just my observation) Some bumpers are 3 or 4 feet of the ground. Apparently there is nothing illegal about this.
Do people do that in the UK? or anywhere else for that matter?
Jacked up trucks is definitely a thing out here in Hawaii. IDK if this has anything to do with increased pedestrian deaths at night.
On mobile phones, maybe pedestrians are staring at their phones instead of pay attention to vehicles around them, as opposed to this being the drivers? What is the driver to do if someone suddenly staring at their phone walks in front of them?
On the kids number being greatly decreased, I speculate because kids are kept (or just want to stay) inside and stare at screens, instead of being outside running around the neighborhood, or on bikes (although kids killed on bikes is probably not counted in the pedestrian category).
Since the Reagan/Thatcher ascendance of the philosophy that individual 'freedom' trumps social benefit, and the resulting increase in mortality, I would guess that US and UK statistics track each other more closely than compared to mainland Western Europe.
I actually subscribed just to say here that the pedestrian deaths seem like a wicked combination of several things. It's not vehicle weight, but bluntness and especially height that matter. I'd also argue that tall vehicles didn't saturate the roads (used market) until the 2010's. Height is particularly important because of headlights. In the 2010s headlights became higher of the ground and as bright as welding arcs. I don't know a single person that doesn't complain that driving at night has become obnoxious because of this, and that jives a little too well with that evening death data. One more thing is that it's not just the phones, but the dashboard of a car has become giant shiny touchscreen entertainment systems in the 2010s, if not brighter, certainly more distracting, particularly at night.
So my theory is that it's a little bit of everything coming together, including Americans possibly being more burnt out and distracted than ever (walking and behing the wheel) which the data seems to support as well. What Urbanists are right about is that cars and pedestrians just don't mix well the way much of U.S. places are laid out. I often wonder if it's that more people are walking than before in that inhospitable environment.
I would like to run a regression using canabis sales and opiate deaths to predict pedestrian fatalities. The fact that the increase is concentrated in the evening suggests intoxication has some explanatory power.
It's a bit unfortunate that it's aggregated nationally, so we don't really have the comparison of the time of death to local sunset, but the pattern shifting with the season (including the smaller pre-dawn bump shifting in the opposite directions) seems strongly suggestive. It would be nice to know if it was right before sunset (and right after sunrise) or right after sunset (and right before sunrise) or 45 minutes off.
Yes I guess it could either be the pedestrian or the driver that is distracted by their phone but I think that people generally look after themselves and the person in the most vulnerable situation is likely to be the most careful. In the UK where there is a law against phoning while driving there has been a 40% fall in pedestrian deaths since 2004.
On the subject of philosophy, I think your point about the different expectations we have of philosophers of scientists is on the right track. I would argue that while both are essential and complementary, the way we engage with them in a chronological sense is exactly opposite. Science moves society forward by pushing the boundaries of knowledge and expanding our conception of what is possible, whereas philosophy grounds us in our essential humanity which connects us to all of our fellow humans across time and space.
There is no point for a student at the introductory level to read Newton in the original unless they want to out of personal curiosity because his ideas where a building block. We want students to know how our knowledge of physics got to where it is but we don't want them to think it remains where it was in the seventeenth century. Assigning a student to read Plato or Confucius or an ancient epic like Gilgamesh or the Bhagavad Ghita on the other hand is useful because that moment when you realize that you have a deep personal connection to an author who has been dead for thousands of years but knows you better than many of your supposedly closest friends do is the moment when you have seen into the infinite that Newton and Bohr and Einstein were trying to map.
While I think it's reasonably likely that phones while driving is a cause of pedestrian deaths, it seems plausible thst phones while walking is too. In particularly the increasing ubiquity of listening to music or a podcast on your noise-cancelling airpods while walking.
This would help explain both the age and timing. I suspect prime-age adults are more likely to have a phone and be using it than either kids or 65+ adults (who I've never been able to successfully explain a podcast to). Hearing cars coming is also particularly important at night, when you may not see the car coming and the car may not see you.
I expect most pedestrians would concentrate on the road when they're actually crossing the street: the US/European disparity in deaths may be in part due to many US suburbs lacking sidewalks, forcing US pedestrians to actually walk in the road itself (where they are more likely to be distracted by phones) as opposed to just crossing the road occasionally as Europeans do.
Of course most pedestrians concentrate on the road when they're crossing the street. And most pedestrians don't get killed.
We're talking small numbers here. I can fully believe that distracted pedestrian behavior is a major driver of pedestrian deaths *and* that those distracted pedestrians are a tiny proportion of all pedestrians.
1. On pop culture, the "game" has shifted to gaming... which seems to be missing from this analysis. There is an incredible amount of creative innovation happening in this space. I don't think the stagnation argument holds. My son just became an intern at a gaming company with the title "Narrative Architect." I have discovered this is the gaming equivalent of a playwright or screenwriter.
2. On pedestrian deaths, the biggest correlation seems to be night time. The US infrastructure is much less friendly to pedestrians, especially in suburb situations. As there is growth in these areas (Florida being the exemplar), there is increased risk for pedestrians. The top states for pedestrian deaths are sunbelt growth states with mid-density situations.
3. On Mexico/China, completely agree.
4. On Education, there is a scattering effect in "standard" education. Once you have the ability to read/write/basic math, the channels for knowledge acquisition have grown well beyond formal education. The current "formal" education system (beyond K-6) needs major restructuring to adapt to the new realities of today's society.
5. On philosophers/physicists, I would like to take the other side. It is in fact very important in math/science to show HOW the most brilliant minds in the world at the time got it wrong. Almost always, they had a good argument. Today, math/science is presented in whole form. These are very deep/complex subjects, yet we expect high-schoolers to absorb/understand. In the process, we demotivate many students and lose them from the STEM fields. A true understanding of a concept involves understanding all the reasonable ways it was misunderstood earlier.
Gaming is in a weird situation, right now - as an industry and a job, it's going through a period of real pain, with terrible crunch and severe mistreatment of employees both being very widespread, especially in the biggest-budget studios. But as an art form, it's *extremely* healthy right now, healthier than TV or movies in my opinion. It has great games being made at every level of budget. There are a lot more artistically ambitious 'blockbuster' high-budget games than movies, and also a significant middle-of-the-road "AA" layer and a huge and thriving indie scene, products of which have a very real shot at becoming huge mass successes - neither of which really exist in movies anymore. It's an industry that exists almost entirely in digital distribution and is tightly integrated with the streamer and influencer scenes, so anyone can play anything, so there are no TV channels or streaming platforms to divide up who can access what. And the most artistically thoughtful developers are making games like Disco Elysium and Pathologic 2 that are as well-written and interesting as any classic literature. The only thing still really holding gaming back as a cultural force is that the interactive element is still an insuperable barrier, especially for older people. An old critic can watch a TV show or read a comic book and appreciate the craft. Most older people and non-gamers in general really are not going learn to use a controller. So games are better than ever, but we're still another generation or so away from them really taking center stage as a dynamic cultural force, because the act of playing them is inaccessible to critics that aren't already dedicated games critics or journalists.
You seem to know a lot more about it than I do...my only insight is from my son, and I was frankly very impressed with the level of ambition and storytelling. Thanks for all this information.
Europeans have less nighttime pedestrian casualties for a number of related reasons, but basically because they are more disciplined (or obedient or regimented) urban drivers. Laws are enforced, often with ubiquitous cameras, and not just speed cameras. Lane discipline. Lower urban speed limits. More roundabouts less traffic lights. Running Stop signs - actually, actual STOP signs are infrequent in Europe, as most intersections have one right-of-way and cross streets are Yield. No turn on Red. Hans-free cell phones (if at all).
A pointy-nosed heavy EV will roll you over the hood and injure you, but a slab-nosed F-150 (or Escalade) will just blunt-force smush you to death. Not many pickups in Europe.
But by far the biggest difference, IMO, is that European cars are hard-wired with daytime running lights and nighttime full lights. I would love to see statistics on how many American 'nightime' deaths are in fact dusk and dawn deaths caused by vehicles without lights on, with the drivers blind to the fact that they are essentially invisible to pedestrians.
Important points about the lights. I'm noticing that as more and more cars have automatic lights including daylights, those without lights around dusk (I don't drive around dawn) become less and less noticeable. Pedestrian clothing is also an issue. I struggle at the crosswalks at our local college not only because of headlights in my eyes, but because of the penchant for dark clothes and hoodies among the students. In at least one case, I only knew someone was crossing because I saw legs against the headlights of a car coming from the other direction.
a) Phones are bright, but much less bright than the sun.
b) So in the daytime, you can still see objects when looking at your phone.
c) At night, phone-viewing contracts your pupils and impairs night vision. You won't notice things ahead of the car as well or react as effectively when you do.
Maybe a similar effect from those in-car touchscreen monstrosities that all cars seem to have now.
"We expect philosophers to help us think about complex problems that usually have no definitive, verifiably “correct” answer... the latter requires nuance and depth."
Wow, is that a pollyanna POV. As soon as you say it cannot be verifiably correct, you open up the whole can of worms to every crackpot and fraud. "Nuance and depth" sound like euphemisms for vagueness.
"I believe philosophical thinking is a necessary tool. But not for any knowledge or wisdom. The only valid use I find for philosophy is to REJECT ideas: most prominently those of philosophers."
They contradict each other so very much that at most only a tiny fraction could be true.
They are usually not rooted in observed reality: they believe untestable things such as natural rights, souls or morality.
They play stupid word games.
Their logic is grotesque.
They usually slide in is/ought fallacies or ideals/absolutes which do not exist.
They do not use measurement or confidence intervals in their analysis.
Reliance on intuitions, which Steven Colbert mocks as "gut feelings"".
Archaic bullshit such as "truth", "natural rights", and "a priori knowledge".
A couple thoughts on pedestrian deaths and a comment on bicycling fatalities.
A. Check the data, but I think you'll find that 95% or more of these fatalities do not result in any charges like involuntary manslaughter, against the driver. This literally means, pedestrians as well as bicyclists are at fault.
B. There is overall, a growing sense of entitlement, a diminishing level of personal responsibility. This means, Pedestrians and cyclists expect !!!! You to totally watch out for them, even when they illegally enter a crosswalk, do not check safe passage, bike uncarelessly so that drivers have to cross double lines for distance.
C. We have an older population. It is very factual that eyesight acuity, motion awareness and reflex times are worse after X age. Still, A applies.
D. Yes, there are distracted walkers. Tucson has mild weather and we have a high level of pedestrian fatalities unfortunately. I've seen multiple distracted walkers
Anyway..my 2 cents. It comes down to the basic changes in American culture as in B.
The failure to criminally charge a driver for a pedestrian or bicyclist death does not "literally mean" that the latter must be at least partially at fault. Rather, it reflects the fact that criminal charges require a higher degree of culpability (gross negligence vs. simple negligence) and burden of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt vs. preponderance of the evidence) compared with civil charges. Thus it is possible, and indeed quite common, to have cases where a driver is clearly at fault by civil standards, but where prosecutors decline to bring criminal charges because of the difficulty of obtaining a conviction.
And to be clear, when i refer to "the difficulty of obtaining a conviction" I don't mean that as a criticism of prosecutors or the existing law. Criminal charges should be subject to high standards, and prosecutors should not bring cases they don't think they can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
Is the night-time concentration of pedestrian deaths a result of either drivers or pedestrians being more likely to be under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs?
If you look at the detailed charts the NYTimes has, you’ll see that the highest pedestrian death rate is the hour or so after sunset, changing with the season. I don’t think people drink or do drugs earlier in the winter and later in the summer, so it seems much more likely to be driven by lighting.
It's quite obvious that the increased pedestrian fatalities come form increased homelessness, drug use and where homeless people live (often around highways). Even that quoted NYT article says "In 2021, 70 percent of Portland’s pedestrian fatalities were among the homeless." This seems like a big omission in Mr. Smith's argument.
That was my first thought as well. (I don't agree that it's "quite obvious," but it certainly warrants consideration.)
Good point about obviousness. Also I have no clue about the rate, i.e. increase. It's just obvious to me in Tucson, where most pedestrians seem to be the homeless. And even when I commute on my bike, the major risk is hitting a shopping cart on the underpass bike path. Coupled with alarming charts about drug overdoses, that's where I would look first.
Tucson (and other cities in the desert Southwest) may be exceptional cases though, as the heat makes travelling on foot highly undesirable and thus the preserve of those bereft of other options.
I wonder if the US has a particular problem with discarded shopping carts because the US lacks a sufficiently valuable coin in widespread circulation to make the coin deposit system (ubiquitous in Europe) practical there? A euro coin is worth roughly 4 US quarters while a UK pound coin is worth roughly 5 quarters.
I thought they only had those carts in Moscow 🤣. It would be great to get rid of pennies and nickels and $1 bills and have $1 and $5 coins, but I don’t think that will stop shopping cart thefts, even the carts with the virtual fence and locking wheels get stolen. Maybe a better solution would be to put an AirTag like tracker on the carts and pay bigger bounties on returning them to the stores.
Do the pedestrian deaths include cyclists? There are a lot of cyclists in Tucson also, and most do not appear to be homeless. There are lots of bike lanes here, but lack of internal freeways and high boulevard speed limits makes them pretty high risk, so I stick to The Loop when cycling.
I don’t think it includes bicyclists.
I commute mostly via the Loop. There, shopping carts are especially magical. As the homeless folks prefer the underbelly of bridges, that’s where the carts often are. Because the Loop goes down under the bridge, it is the spot where bicyclists go fastest. Next factor, it’s the darkest spot. Blinded by bright Tucson sun, and with dark sunglasses, it’s really dark down there, for those fast 5 seconds (I pedal 20 mph on regular path, 30 mph down under; yes, it’s dumb). And lastly, that part of the Loop is also one of the narrowest. So, sudden detection af a shopping cart freaks you out, and in that high speed, you try to avoid it, while not hitting another fast blind bicyclist in the opposite direction. Magical.
Very true. I was driving through downtown Chicago couple days ago and had two close calls with zombie like homeless wandering through busy traffic.
I've got a hunch that cultural stagnation has at least something to do with a fear of transgressing boundaries. Killing sacred cows and challenging the prevailing wisdom used to be at the forefront of culture and it's not anymore. There's a deep fear of cancel culture, so people in our cultural spaces tend to play it safe these days - at least in comparison to the 70s and 80s. Additionally, the cultural gatekeepers have themselves become highly intolerant, far less willing than they used to be to quickly champion rule breakers. Think of the Lower East Side Movement of the early 1980s - people went to jail for showing the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, a gay artist whose deeply beautiful photographs of flowers, objects and naked men were deeply controversial at the time. But museums and gallery owners risked showing his work. Today? Not sure they would.
I'd suggest high housing costs are another big factor behind cultural stagnation: they shrink the potential talent pool because "creative" careers are now way too big a risk for young people who don't have rich parents to help them out. Especially given that agglomeration effects are at least as important in the creative industries as in any other industries.
https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2018/03/cultural-costs-of-high-house-prices.html
As the Blondie guitarist Chris Stein put it: "Everybody who helped add to the cachet of the city can’t live there anymore. The biggest shame is that everybody’s gotta have a job to live in the city now. There’s no time to make art. How can you keep your credibility if you have some stupid job you hate and still be a radical? I never had a job ever. I painted a bathroom once and that was it. I was in the band for 30 years.”
Chris just doesn’t consider playing guitar in a band to be a job, but if he’s getting paid that’s what it is. Punk/new wave/hiphop musicians maybe depended on cheap urban living to be creative, but with technology now anyone can become famous and make money on YouTube/TikTok/Twitch and can live out in the cheap boonies or Detroit without worrying about housing prices (which of course are artificially high in coastal urban areas because of restricted supply). I don’t think authors, filmmakers or tv shows have any limitations based on housing supply, authors can still crank out novels while living in a shack with a typewriter and whisky in the middle of nowhere, and movies usually require more costs for production and marketing (only recent profitable movie with a budget of under $50K I cam think of was Paranormal Activity in 2007) and studios and streamers are still gatekeepers, unless you count TikTokers or Mr. Beast as “TV shows”.
Playing guitar in a band may be a job, but it's unlikely to ever be one that has a guaranteed minimum wage.
While UK formally has a ban on phoning while driving, this isn't enforced. The get out of using hands free kits has been researched to be almost as distracting. Current car design of screens out of drivers view encourages distraction. Road designs have improved road safety by slowing cars. The weight rise translates into potholes under the fourth power law.
Yes, I'm really unhappy with the concept of centrally located touch screens to control much of the car and provide information. This requires drivers to look away from the road more and more often, for longer periods. I"m concerned that when I finally buy another car, I won't be able to find one with a safe and truly functional interface such as my current car has.
I looked up the UK stats on road deaths : https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2021/reported-road-casualties-great-britain-pedestrian-factsheet-2021 which are in quite a contrast to the US. Personally I think a driver may be continued push to improve urban road safety with traffic calming measures and low speed limits (20 mph in most urban areas) which while disliked by most drivers while driving (including myself) must reduce frequency and severity of collisions. I think mobile use is at least as much an issue in the UK albeit it is theoretically illegal.
This is so true. Both SUVs ownership and smartphone use is very high in the UK. Increased pedestrian traffic. With pedestrian deaths *decreasing* that means we can't just blame SUVs, smartphones: road safety can be tackled with many other ways: better driver and pedestrian education, road and pavement (sidewalk) design, and so on. It's just so easy to blame one technology or other, while throughout humanity we have always used some kind of technology and adapted our society to handle it (with varying degrees of success, obviously!)
Are US SUVs typically larger (and thus taller and hence more dangerous to pedestrians) than UK SUVs?
I'm not saying this is the reason, but a huge number of people around me lift their pickups and SUVs onto larger tires than they came with. I'd say that percentage has increased in the last ten years. (just my observation) Some bumpers are 3 or 4 feet of the ground. Apparently there is nothing illegal about this.
Do people do that in the UK? or anywhere else for that matter?
Jacked up trucks is definitely a thing out here in Hawaii. IDK if this has anything to do with increased pedestrian deaths at night.
On mobile phones, maybe pedestrians are staring at their phones instead of pay attention to vehicles around them, as opposed to this being the drivers? What is the driver to do if someone suddenly staring at their phone walks in front of them?
On the kids number being greatly decreased, I speculate because kids are kept (or just want to stay) inside and stare at screens, instead of being outside running around the neighborhood, or on bikes (although kids killed on bikes is probably not counted in the pedestrian category).
Since the Reagan/Thatcher ascendance of the philosophy that individual 'freedom' trumps social benefit, and the resulting increase in mortality, I would guess that US and UK statistics track each other more closely than compared to mainland Western Europe.
I actually subscribed just to say here that the pedestrian deaths seem like a wicked combination of several things. It's not vehicle weight, but bluntness and especially height that matter. I'd also argue that tall vehicles didn't saturate the roads (used market) until the 2010's. Height is particularly important because of headlights. In the 2010s headlights became higher of the ground and as bright as welding arcs. I don't know a single person that doesn't complain that driving at night has become obnoxious because of this, and that jives a little too well with that evening death data. One more thing is that it's not just the phones, but the dashboard of a car has become giant shiny touchscreen entertainment systems in the 2010s, if not brighter, certainly more distracting, particularly at night.
So my theory is that it's a little bit of everything coming together, including Americans possibly being more burnt out and distracted than ever (walking and behing the wheel) which the data seems to support as well. What Urbanists are right about is that cars and pedestrians just don't mix well the way much of U.S. places are laid out. I often wonder if it's that more people are walking than before in that inhospitable environment.
I would like to run a regression using canabis sales and opiate deaths to predict pedestrian fatalities. The fact that the increase is concentrated in the evening suggests intoxication has some explanatory power.
But it is concentrated in the hour or so after sunset, earlier in winter and later in summer.
Maybe it is due to less effective sun visors in cars, or darker clothing on pedestrians.
interesting. link?
Here's a gift link for the NYTimes article. I think the relevant graph is the third one (unless I miscounted): https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/12/11/upshot/nighttime-deaths.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Wk0._T7D.KYEqOXOcEDuF&smid=url-share
It's a bit unfortunate that it's aggregated nationally, so we don't really have the comparison of the time of death to local sunset, but the pattern shifting with the season (including the smaller pre-dawn bump shifting in the opposite directions) seems strongly suggestive. It would be nice to know if it was right before sunset (and right after sunrise) or right after sunset (and right before sunrise) or 45 minutes off.
If someone zonked on fentanyl stumbles into traffic on Market Street is that an opiate death or a pedestrian fatality?
both!
Yes I guess it could either be the pedestrian or the driver that is distracted by their phone but I think that people generally look after themselves and the person in the most vulnerable situation is likely to be the most careful. In the UK where there is a law against phoning while driving there has been a 40% fall in pedestrian deaths since 2004.
On the subject of philosophy, I think your point about the different expectations we have of philosophers of scientists is on the right track. I would argue that while both are essential and complementary, the way we engage with them in a chronological sense is exactly opposite. Science moves society forward by pushing the boundaries of knowledge and expanding our conception of what is possible, whereas philosophy grounds us in our essential humanity which connects us to all of our fellow humans across time and space.
There is no point for a student at the introductory level to read Newton in the original unless they want to out of personal curiosity because his ideas where a building block. We want students to know how our knowledge of physics got to where it is but we don't want them to think it remains where it was in the seventeenth century. Assigning a student to read Plato or Confucius or an ancient epic like Gilgamesh or the Bhagavad Ghita on the other hand is useful because that moment when you realize that you have a deep personal connection to an author who has been dead for thousands of years but knows you better than many of your supposedly closest friends do is the moment when you have seen into the infinite that Newton and Bohr and Einstein were trying to map.
While I think it's reasonably likely that phones while driving is a cause of pedestrian deaths, it seems plausible thst phones while walking is too. In particularly the increasing ubiquity of listening to music or a podcast on your noise-cancelling airpods while walking.
This would help explain both the age and timing. I suspect prime-age adults are more likely to have a phone and be using it than either kids or 65+ adults (who I've never been able to successfully explain a podcast to). Hearing cars coming is also particularly important at night, when you may not see the car coming and the car may not see you.
I expect most pedestrians would concentrate on the road when they're actually crossing the street: the US/European disparity in deaths may be in part due to many US suburbs lacking sidewalks, forcing US pedestrians to actually walk in the road itself (where they are more likely to be distracted by phones) as opposed to just crossing the road occasionally as Europeans do.
Of course most pedestrians concentrate on the road when they're crossing the street. And most pedestrians don't get killed.
We're talking small numbers here. I can fully believe that distracted pedestrian behavior is a major driver of pedestrian deaths *and* that those distracted pedestrians are a tiny proportion of all pedestrians.
As always a great list: A few comments:
1. On pop culture, the "game" has shifted to gaming... which seems to be missing from this analysis. There is an incredible amount of creative innovation happening in this space. I don't think the stagnation argument holds. My son just became an intern at a gaming company with the title "Narrative Architect." I have discovered this is the gaming equivalent of a playwright or screenwriter.
2. On pedestrian deaths, the biggest correlation seems to be night time. The US infrastructure is much less friendly to pedestrians, especially in suburb situations. As there is growth in these areas (Florida being the exemplar), there is increased risk for pedestrians. The top states for pedestrian deaths are sunbelt growth states with mid-density situations.
3. On Mexico/China, completely agree.
4. On Education, there is a scattering effect in "standard" education. Once you have the ability to read/write/basic math, the channels for knowledge acquisition have grown well beyond formal education. The current "formal" education system (beyond K-6) needs major restructuring to adapt to the new realities of today's society.
5. On philosophers/physicists, I would like to take the other side. It is in fact very important in math/science to show HOW the most brilliant minds in the world at the time got it wrong. Almost always, they had a good argument. Today, math/science is presented in whole form. These are very deep/complex subjects, yet we expect high-schoolers to absorb/understand. In the process, we demotivate many students and lose them from the STEM fields. A true understanding of a concept involves understanding all the reasonable ways it was misunderstood earlier.
Gaming is in a weird situation, right now - as an industry and a job, it's going through a period of real pain, with terrible crunch and severe mistreatment of employees both being very widespread, especially in the biggest-budget studios. But as an art form, it's *extremely* healthy right now, healthier than TV or movies in my opinion. It has great games being made at every level of budget. There are a lot more artistically ambitious 'blockbuster' high-budget games than movies, and also a significant middle-of-the-road "AA" layer and a huge and thriving indie scene, products of which have a very real shot at becoming huge mass successes - neither of which really exist in movies anymore. It's an industry that exists almost entirely in digital distribution and is tightly integrated with the streamer and influencer scenes, so anyone can play anything, so there are no TV channels or streaming platforms to divide up who can access what. And the most artistically thoughtful developers are making games like Disco Elysium and Pathologic 2 that are as well-written and interesting as any classic literature. The only thing still really holding gaming back as a cultural force is that the interactive element is still an insuperable barrier, especially for older people. An old critic can watch a TV show or read a comic book and appreciate the craft. Most older people and non-gamers in general really are not going learn to use a controller. So games are better than ever, but we're still another generation or so away from them really taking center stage as a dynamic cultural force, because the act of playing them is inaccessible to critics that aren't already dedicated games critics or journalists.
David,
You seem to know a lot more about it than I do...my only insight is from my son, and I was frankly very impressed with the level of ambition and storytelling. Thanks for all this information.
/Rahul
I hope your son is successful! It's an incredibly cool field, when narrative is integrated with interactivity effectively it's *really* satisfying.
are you in the industry ?
No, just a longtime gamer and appreciator of the unique things the medium can do. I'm decently informed.
Europeans have less nighttime pedestrian casualties for a number of related reasons, but basically because they are more disciplined (or obedient or regimented) urban drivers. Laws are enforced, often with ubiquitous cameras, and not just speed cameras. Lane discipline. Lower urban speed limits. More roundabouts less traffic lights. Running Stop signs - actually, actual STOP signs are infrequent in Europe, as most intersections have one right-of-way and cross streets are Yield. No turn on Red. Hans-free cell phones (if at all).
A pointy-nosed heavy EV will roll you over the hood and injure you, but a slab-nosed F-150 (or Escalade) will just blunt-force smush you to death. Not many pickups in Europe.
But by far the biggest difference, IMO, is that European cars are hard-wired with daytime running lights and nighttime full lights. I would love to see statistics on how many American 'nightime' deaths are in fact dusk and dawn deaths caused by vehicles without lights on, with the drivers blind to the fact that they are essentially invisible to pedestrians.
Lane discipline, in Rome or Paris? When I drove there it frequently felt like the scene at the Arc d`Triumph in John Wick 4.
Important points about the lights. I'm noticing that as more and more cars have automatic lights including daylights, those without lights around dusk (I don't drive around dawn) become less and less noticeable. Pedestrian clothing is also an issue. I struggle at the crosswalks at our local college not only because of headlights in my eyes, but because of the penchant for dark clothes and hoodies among the students. In at least one case, I only knew someone was crossing because I saw legs against the headlights of a car coming from the other direction.
I think driver behavior has deteriorated, especially post pandemic: more speeding, aggressive lane changing, muffle noise, honking.
Maybe this is a little too cute, but:
a) Phones are bright, but much less bright than the sun.
b) So in the daytime, you can still see objects when looking at your phone.
c) At night, phone-viewing contracts your pupils and impairs night vision. You won't notice things ahead of the car as well or react as effectively when you do.
Maybe a similar effect from those in-car touchscreen monstrosities that all cars seem to have now.
"We expect philosophers to help us think about complex problems that usually have no definitive, verifiably “correct” answer... the latter requires nuance and depth."
Wow, is that a pollyanna POV. As soon as you say it cannot be verifiably correct, you open up the whole can of worms to every crackpot and fraud. "Nuance and depth" sound like euphemisms for vagueness.
Allow me to recommend my Disgust With Philosophy page: https://web.archive.org/web/20200809212411/http://huben.us/wiki/Disgust_With_Philosophy
"I believe philosophical thinking is a necessary tool. But not for any knowledge or wisdom. The only valid use I find for philosophy is to REJECT ideas: most prominently those of philosophers."
They contradict each other so very much that at most only a tiny fraction could be true.
They are usually not rooted in observed reality: they believe untestable things such as natural rights, souls or morality.
They play stupid word games.
Their logic is grotesque.
They usually slide in is/ought fallacies or ideals/absolutes which do not exist.
They do not use measurement or confidence intervals in their analysis.
Reliance on intuitions, which Steven Colbert mocks as "gut feelings"".
Archaic bullshit such as "truth", "natural rights", and "a priori knowledge".
It has all the rigor of a game of Calvinball.
A couple thoughts on pedestrian deaths and a comment on bicycling fatalities.
A. Check the data, but I think you'll find that 95% or more of these fatalities do not result in any charges like involuntary manslaughter, against the driver. This literally means, pedestrians as well as bicyclists are at fault.
B. There is overall, a growing sense of entitlement, a diminishing level of personal responsibility. This means, Pedestrians and cyclists expect !!!! You to totally watch out for them, even when they illegally enter a crosswalk, do not check safe passage, bike uncarelessly so that drivers have to cross double lines for distance.
C. We have an older population. It is very factual that eyesight acuity, motion awareness and reflex times are worse after X age. Still, A applies.
D. Yes, there are distracted walkers. Tucson has mild weather and we have a high level of pedestrian fatalities unfortunately. I've seen multiple distracted walkers
Anyway..my 2 cents. It comes down to the basic changes in American culture as in B.
The failure to criminally charge a driver for a pedestrian or bicyclist death does not "literally mean" that the latter must be at least partially at fault. Rather, it reflects the fact that criminal charges require a higher degree of culpability (gross negligence vs. simple negligence) and burden of proof (beyond a reasonable doubt vs. preponderance of the evidence) compared with civil charges. Thus it is possible, and indeed quite common, to have cases where a driver is clearly at fault by civil standards, but where prosecutors decline to bring criminal charges because of the difficulty of obtaining a conviction.
Good point in today's time. America no longer enforces traffic laws like we did when I learned to driveN late 60s.
People today speed in school zones. Pass over double lines. Reckless drivers..mad MAGA mostlynin a truck. Rolling no Stops at stop signs. Sad.
And to be clear, when i refer to "the difficulty of obtaining a conviction" I don't mean that as a criticism of prosecutors or the existing law. Criminal charges should be subject to high standards, and prosecutors should not bring cases they don't think they can prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.
Is the night-time concentration of pedestrian deaths a result of either drivers or pedestrians being more likely to be under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs?
If you look at the detailed charts the NYTimes has, you’ll see that the highest pedestrian death rate is the hour or so after sunset, changing with the season. I don’t think people drink or do drugs earlier in the winter and later in the summer, so it seems much more likely to be driven by lighting.
There is also a peak around sunrise, but it’s much smaller, so if it’s lighting that’s at fault an explanation for that would also be needed.