The rise in pedestrian deaths and the factors contributing to this rise.

The Perfect Crime - Discussion on pedestrian deaths and the supremacy of cars in the legal and transportation systems in America.

Advocacy efforts to reclaim space from cars for bus riders, cyclists, and pedestrians in New York City.

Designing Streets for Crashes - Discussion on how the design of streets and roadways contributes to pedestrian fatalities.

Identification of reasons for the rise in pedestrian deaths, including vehicle size, distracted driving, and regional location.

Pedestrian Danger Zones - Exploring dangerous intersections and the imbalance in street space allocation in New York City.

Efforts to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries through the Vision Zero initiative in New York City.

Street Design and Liability - Impact of federal traffic guidelines on street design and legal liability for municipalities.

Discussion on the importance of safe infrastructure and the impact of road rage on drivers.

Driver Distraction - Analysis of driver distractions, including the prevalence of cell phone use and in-vehicle information systems.

Discussion on media coverage of road transport and the shift in responsibility from pedestrians to drivers in press releases.

Strategies for Reducing Traffic Fatalities - Insights into effective measures for reducing traffic fatalities, including speed cameras and roadway narrowing.

Creating a Safer Future - Exploring the potential for creating a safer environment through infrastructure improvements and community engagement.

The cars driven in the U.S. are smaller and slower

The rate of pedestrian deaths per mile driven is the highest in more than 40 years

The U.S. has stricter laws for pedestrian safety

Pedestrians have more protection in the U.S. compared to other countries

Increased pedestrian density in urban areas

It is a rule that allows drivers to rewrite the speed limit for a particular road

It is a rule that limits the speed of traffic to 85% of the suggested speed limit

It is a rule that requires drivers to drive at 85% of the speed limit

It is a rule that allows municipalities to set their own speed limits

Talking to a passenger or someone on a cell phone

Interacting with voice assistants that come along with your phone

- The US has a high rate of pedestrian deaths, with an increase in both raw numbers and deaths per mile driven.
- The design of streets prioritizes car movement over pedestrian safety.
- Drivers are operating in a system that is designed to create crashes.
- Advocacy groups aim to rebalance streets to better reflect how people move around.
- Dangerous intersections in New York City demonstrate the imbalance between car space and pedestrian space.
- The increase in pedestrian deaths can be attributed to factors such as larger and faster cars.

- Pedestrian deaths in the US have increased due to several factors: SUVs being more dangerous, increased driving and walking, distracted driving, and people moving to less safe regions.
- The 85th percentile rule in traffic control devices allows the speed limit to be changed if 85% of drivers are driving at a certain speed, even if it is higher than the suggested speed limit.
- This rule gives the ability to make roads faster to those who are already driving recklessly.
- The rule has received criticism and there have been calls to end it to make roads safer.
- The design of roads based on federal traffic guidelines limits experimentation and improvement, and may contribute to the lack of punishment for drivers who kill pedestrians.
- Distraction is one of the major reasons for the increase in roadway fatalities, with tasks like using voice assistants being highly distracting.
- Pedestrian deaths should not be solely focused on, as the actions of drivers pose a greater risk.

- Voice assistants are slow and error-prone, representing so-so technology.
- Humans are fallible drivers and easily get distracted, leading to inattentional blindness.
- Multitasking compromises driving as it takes attention away from the task at hand.
- Approximately 1 in 10 drivers engage in some form of cell phone-related distraction while driving.
- Dashboard displays in cars also contribute to distractions, but there is little regulation or oversight.
- The prevalence of distractions, including cell phone use, contributes to pedestrian deaths.
- Road design and manual transmissions may also play a role in pedestrian fatalities.
- Wearing noise-canceling headphones while walking puts pedestrians at risk.
- Other-regarding behavior during the pandemic may have contributed to the rise in pedestrian deaths.
- There is anecdotal evidence but no concrete proof of the impact of other-regarding behavior on driving.

- The focus on other-regarding behavior in transportation is a point of disagreement among professionals
- Safe infrastructure is not enough if drivers have road rage
- The concept of shared streets, where pedestrians and cars coexist, can be safer because it forces drivers to be more careful
- Some safety advocates argue for separating cars from pedestrians and cyclists
- Speed cameras and narrowing roadways can be effective in reducing accidents
- Educational campaigns have shown no evidence of effectiveness
- The media tends to defer to experts and police press releases, which can contain victim-blaming language

- The podcast discusses the issue of pedestrian safety and how the blame is often shifted to the pedestrian without proper information.
- The hosts suggest shifting the blame to the driver in order to create a change in mindset and improve safety.
- They acknowledge that infrastructure improvements and systems approaches take time and may not be enough to solve the problem.
- The focus should be on parents of children and teenagers, as well as remembering the lost sense of community due to excessive driving.
- They compare the safety improvements in flying to the potential for making auto travel safer.
- The podcast ends with a teaser for the next episode on the economics of whaling.

- US has high pedestrian death rates, with an increase in both raw numbers and deaths per mile driven.
- Streets prioritize car movement over pedestrian safety.
- Advocacy groups aim to rebalance streets to better reflect how people move around.
- Factors contributing to pedestrian deaths include larger and faster cars, SUVs being more dangerous, increased driving and walking, distracted driving, and people moving to less safe regions.
- The 85th percentile rule in traffic control devices allows for higher speed limits, which has received criticism and calls for its end.
- Distraction, including cell phone use, is a major reason for the increase in roadway fatalities.
- Other factors contributing to pedestrian deaths include road design, manual transmissions, wearing noise-canceling headphones while walking, and other-regarding behavior during the pandemic.
- Shared streets, separating cars from pedestrians, speed cameras, and narrowing roadways can be effective in reducing accidents.
- Educational campaigns have shown no evidence of effectiveness.
- Media tends to blame pedestrians without proper information, but the focus should shift to blaming drivers for safety improvement.
- Infrastructure improvements and systems approaches may not be enough to solve the problem.
- Focus should be on parents of children and teenagers, and the lost sense of community due to excessive driving.
- The podcast ends with a teaser for the next episode on the economics of whaling.

Actually, the reasons are pretty clear. The harder question is: Will we ever care enough to stop?

We made an episode almost a decade ago called The Perfect Crime.

The idea was that if you wanted to kill someone and not go to prison, the best way would be to simply run them over with your car.

That's the way it works, especially in America.

If you're driving a car and you kill a pedestrian, even if it's entirely your fault, most likely nothing very bad will happen to you.

In our legal and transportation systems, the car is supreme and pedestrians don't have much protection.

Back when we made that episode, I guess we had a slight hope that presenting the data and discussing the problem might lead to some progress.

In 2014, the year we published The Perfect Crime, there were just under 5, 000 pedestrian deaths in the US.

And it's not just the raw numbers increasing.

The rate of pedestrian deaths per mile driven is the highest in more than 40 years.

Even during the pandemic, when driving was way down, pedestrian deaths continued to rise.

Among the world's high-income countries, the U.S.

Is particularly good at killing pedestrians.

The death rate here is much higher than in places like northern and western Europe, Canada and Japan.

So today on Freakonomics Radio, we're back at it.

Why are we a world leader in this terrible statistic?

The cars we're driving are bigger, fatter, faster.

The problem of distraction has gotten much worse.

In the United States, we've decided that car movement is really the supreme consideration when it comes to designing our streets.

It isn't just the 1 question we want to answer.

We also want to know what are the best ways to stop the killing?

This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubner.

As you know, or at least I hope you know, I try to be an honest broker on this show.

I'm not trying to be a pundit or an activist or an opinionista.

What I try to do is talk to well-informed people and find data that sheds light on issues that often lie in the shadows.

But in this case, let me just say for the record, I am 100% against the killing of people by cars.

Is it true that pedestrians are sometimes at fault?

And even if so, you could argue that The penalty for stupidity should not be death.

If it were, we'd probably have a much smaller population today than we do.

I am especially against the death of pedestrians because it is so plainly not a fair fight.

I live in Manhattan, and when my kids were little, learning to get around the streets, here's what I used to tell them.

When you are a pedestrian, you can do absolutely everything right and still end up dead.

Here's an interesting statistic to consider from NHTSA, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Only 2 percent of all people injured in traffic crashes are pedestrians, but pedestrians account for 17 percent of all traffic deaths.

That's a pretty good sign that when pedestrians compete against cars, they are bound to lose.

Some of the fault, as we will hear today, lies with drivers themselves.

AMBASSADOR, TRANSPORTATION SCHOLAR, RUTGERS UNIVERSITY

Drivers are operating in a system that is designed to create crashes.

She's a transportation scholar at Rutgers University.

We want to get to the places we want to go quickly, in part because Americans drive so many miles a day.

The average American spends 55 minutes a day in their car.

And we want to get to wherever we're going quickly.

So we have high speeds, we have a lot of cars on the same roadway, and then we have what we call arterial streets.

So imagine 2 or 3 lanes in each direction, a McDonald's, a Home Depot, lots of driveways.

Maybe there's sidewalks, maybe there's not.

People are pulling in, people are pulling out.

And in fact, when we do crash hotspot analysis, these are by far the most dangerous streets in the nation.

In most cities, about 80% of the crashes occur on about 15 to 20% of the roadways.

In New York City, where 119 pedestrians were killed last year, 1 analysis shows that just under 7% of the streets account for more than half of all pedestrian deaths.

Philip Mietkowski, and I'm the senior director of research and policy at Transportation alternatives.

Transportation alternatives is a nonprofit advocacy group here in New York City for 50 years now whose mission is to reclaim space from cars for bus riders, cyclists and pedestrians.

So Transportation Alternatives is an advocacy group, plain and simple, and some people view them as devoutly anti-car.

Using New York City's open data, we calculated that 76% of New York City's street space is dedicated for either moving or storing vehicles.

23% is dedicated for sidewalks, and less than

is dedicated for bus lanes and bike lanes combined.

So the goal here is just to rebalance the streets to better reflect how New Yorkers already move around.

So we happen to be sitting in a recording studio in Midtown Manhattan.

Are any of these dangerous intersections pretty close by?

Can we go take a look and try to avoid getting killed?

Nearly every avenue near the studio here is 1 of those 6.98% of New York City streets.

So you're saying the minute we walk out of the studio, if we go left or right, you're saying in either case, we're coming into a kind of pedestrian danger zone?

So we're on West 45th Street, approaching 10th Avenue, 1 of the more dangerous streets in New York City.

So the street here is really wide, I would say similar to highway width.

Okay, and describe this and how it's, I mean, it's pretty obvious even to me.

It looks a little bit like the Indy motor speedway, but just the straightaway part.

This is a street that's mostly dedicated to funnel as many cars as possible at the most comfortable and fastest rate for them.

So most of these cars are at or above the speed limit.

There's no space given to cyclists, no space given to bus riders, even though there are a lot of buses on this route.

So when you combine all of those factors, it creates this dangerous environment here.

There's probably just eyeballing it, 1 30th or 1 50th the amount of pedestrians here, than there were just a couple blocks east, which is Times Square and bordering Times Square, you think?

So what if I argue, you know, what's wrong with taking an area with low pedestrian density and making that wide open for cars and in the areas that are heavily populated by pedestrians, treating it totally differently.

Yeah, well, the street that you design for, you're going to get the uses that the design is inviting.

So there are fewer pedestrians here, maybe because they do feel less space.

And also, who are we building our streets for?

Is it for the commuters who live in a different state, in New Jersey or in Westchester County, or is it for the residents of New York City?

I do recognize that we're always going to need cars in society, whether you're disabled or whether you live far out from the city or just because you want to.

But right now there's such a huge imbalance.

of our space is dedicated for cars when the majority of New Yorkers don't own a car.

Everybody's behaving here, nobody's running a light.

We made it across 10th Avenue, no problem.

But the data backup Mietkowski's claims about the danger here.

Over a recent two-year period, 1 stretch of 10th Avenue, running from 14th Street up to 59th Street, that's just over 2 miles, saw 3 pedestrian deaths and more than 150 injuries, as well as 1 cyclist death, nearly 100 cyclist injuries, and more than 200 motorist injuries.

So before we continue our adventure with me and Kowski, it's worth taking a step back and asking how did our streets get so dangerous in the first place?

And why over the past 20 years have pedestrian deaths risen much more than other traffic deaths.

That, again, is the transportation scholar Kelsey Ralph.

If you get hit by a sedan, you break your legs and you get thrown over the windshield.

If you get hit by an SUV, you get hit in the chest and then you get pulled under the vehicle.

And we're selling way more SUVs than we used to.

We're driving more, we're also walking more, but pedestrian deaths per million miles driven increased 30% during that time.

So it's not just more driving and more walking, it's something different.

I think distracted driving remains really widespread.

And interestingly, when we looked at police enforcement of distraction, every agency we were talking to said, oh yeah, we do a lot of distracted walking enforcement.

We do a lot of ticketing of people walking distracted.

Not so much of people driving distracted because it's really hard to see them.

Also, let's talk about regional location in the United States.

Americans, they're moving to less safe regions.

People are emptying out of the Northeast, which tends to be fairly safe for people walking and biking, and moving to places like Florida and others that are really high on the pedestrian danger index.

Let's review the 4 reasons Kelsey Ralph just gave for the rise in pedestrian deaths in the U.S.

Number 1, vehicles are bigger and more dangerous.

Number 2, there's more driving and more walking.

Number 3, drivers have more distractions.

And number 4, people are moving away from older cities where narrower streets decrease car speeds and make it safer to walk to places with wider, faster streets.

There is at least 1 more reason why so many pedestrians keep getting hit and killed in the U.S.

So most states have legislation that requires engineers to use what's called the 85th percentile rule when setting their speed limit.

OK, and what is the 85th percentile rule?

So the 85th percentile rule is a rule in the manual and uniform traffic control devices, which is that federal publication that is published by the Federal Highway Administration.

Bronin is a professor of law and urban planning at Cornell.

In 2021, she and Gregory Schill published an article in the Harvard Law Review forum called Rewriting Our Nation's Deadly Traffic Manual.

That's the 818 page manual on uniform traffic control devices for streets and highways, also known as MUTCD.

And it says that for any given roadway, the speed limit can be changed if

or the 85th percentile of drivers are driving a certain speed, even if that speed is higher than the suggested speed limit.

So what it does, unusually among laws generally, is it actually allows a law, the speed limit for a particular road, to be rewritten by the lawbreakers.

The idea is that the 85th percentile rule recognizes what everybody would view as the commonly acceptable speed of traffic, but what it really does is it gives the ability to make a road faster and it hands that ability over to people who were recklessly driving in the first place.

Okay, so I don't mean to be naive about the ways of rulemaking and lawmaking, but why on earth Is that still on the books?

Well, in a recent opening of the MUTCD for its 11th iteration.

Opening meaning an opportunity to revise, yes?

Exactly, so the Federal Highway Administration put out a draft of the MUTCD and invited public comment.

And there were thousands of comments that encouraged the Highway Administration to end the 85th percentile rule, primarily to make roads safer.

The issue is that drivers drive the speed that the roads tell them to drive.

So the 85th percentile rule is a problem, don't get me wrong.

But it also illustrates the fundamental issue, which is that we are designing our roads to enable cars to drive faster in a way that disrespects the other users of a roadway.

Bronin says there's another problem created by these federal traffic guidelines, a problem that may help explain why drivers who kill pedestrians are rarely punished.

If you design streets to those standards as a municipality in particular, you don't have legal liability because you've met this national standard.

By adopting these standards, what happens is you preclude, especially municipalities, from the kind of experimentation that can improve streets and that can tell us which streets work best.

And yet you see local governments like New York City and others aspiring to make their streets safer even in the face of these external constraints.

New York City has adopted an approach called Vision 0 which was pioneered in Sweden.

It is intended to entirely eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries.

I have data from Edmonton, Canada about how many people get hit by drivers.

And so we could really zoom in and look at the actions of the people who were hit.

But if we zoom out, we see that drivers in Edmonton hit

other objects that year, other than pedestrians.

We're talking about parked cars and signs.

It's tempting to focus on the pedestrians because that's where the action is in terms of deaths.

But I think we need to focus on the drivers because that's where the action is in terms of risk.

The gorilla beats his chest and walks out the screen.

That's exactly the kind of impairment that cell phones produce while driving.

Whether you're surfing out west or sunning yourself down south, catching a wave or simply catching up on some Z's.

No matter where your summer adventures lead to, a Click & Collect location is never too far away, where we'll make sure your shopping is picked, packed and ready when you are.

You do the important things, we'll do the essentials.

the trickiest things about understanding pedestrian deaths is the lack of data on what happens right before a crash.

As you can imagine, the driver who hits a pedestrian may tell a story that takes the blame off themself, and the dead pedestrian isn't around to tell their story.

So yes, tricky data to get, but also important data to get.

My name is David Strayer, and I'm a professor in the psychology department at the University of Utah at Directly Applied Cognition Lab, and we study driving and driving behavior.

Strayer has come to know a lot about driving behavior, especially bad behavior.

When we look at fatalities on the roadway, the 4 things that are killing people are speeding, alcohol and intoxication, fatigue and distraction.

Distraction has been prevalent for a long time, but increasing quite rapidly.

And we think that that's 1 of the major reasons for the increase in the number of roadway fatalities.

Much of what Strayer knows comes from the work he does in his lab.

We have 2 advanced driving simulators in my lab.

I have 5 on-road vehicles, and we test people between the ages of 16 and 92.

When it's safe to do so, we'll test them on the road.

When we're engaging in some kind of activity that we think is too demanding, we would do it in the driving simulator.

And just list for me some of the distractions that you're introducing, whether it's in the simulator or in the vehicles on their own.

Listening to a radio, which on our 1 to 5 scale is like a 1.2.

You can measure it, but it's not particularly distracting.

Listening to a book on tape has a score of about 1.7, so more because you have to pay more attention to the audio content.

And by the way, 5 on that scale was the most mentally challenging task that we could think you could do, kind of like balancing your checkbook while driving down the road.

And so that 5 is a really high watermark and you should really think carefully anytime a task gets anywhere near that.

Talking to a passenger or someone on a cell phone has about a

and interacting with these voice assistants that come along with your phone that's oftentimes 4 or higher.

It can get a little bit better with perfect systems.

We've been able to develop some in the lab that are perfect and don't make errors.

But the real-world systems that we all really use on a day-to-day basis, it's probably a 4 or higher on that five-point scale.

I would think that using voice commands for a phone or for the car's dashboard would be less distracting for a driver than using their hands for the same tasks.

It Turns out that using your voice is not, there's no free lunch there.

It takes brain power to think about what you're going to say, how you're going to say it to that voice assistant.

Oftentimes that voice assistant gets it wrong and does the wrong thing.

Some of these activities take 20, 30, sometimes 40 seconds to fully complete.

If you're trying to, say, adjust the temperature in your car, you can just reach over and push 1 button, and that's a much shorter interaction.

So time on task is really important, and the voice assistants tend to go slow and are error-prone.

This distraction represents the cost of what the economist Daron Acemoglu calls so-so technologies.

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548. Why Is the U.S. So Good at Killing Pedestrians?