[jrockway]

> Any Americans want to posit a reason why?

2 things. 1) Covid / social distancing fucked up everyone's interpersonal skills. So if you're driving towards a pedestrian or cyclist, people are like "fuck it, they deserve to die if they're in my way." 2) It's currently the "style" to have pedestrian-killing bull bars on your truck. People think they look cool, but it just crushes the pedestrian you hit into a paste instead of pushing them up and over your hood.

1 is probably hard to fix. 2 should just be made illegal instantly. I get if you drive your pickup truck on a farm, or are regularly participating in high speed chases as a police officer, they might come in handy (?), but if you're driving around in the city commuting to your desk job, you don't need 'em. It just turns "we broke every bone in that poor pedestrian's body" into "he's dead, Jim". Absolutely no need for that; if we want to keep cars around, we need to design them to do minimal damage to the other road users they hit while their drivers are drunk. It might not look cool, but even better than looking cool is not murdering other people.

[Reason077]

On the bright side, at least collision avoidance systems (AEB) in modern vehicles are getting better at detecting and avoiding pedestrians and cyclists.

[TheCoelacanth]

And yet still the pedestrian death toll is rising. Even technology that would seem miraculous 20 years ago isn't enough to slow down the carnage.

[gernb]

This isn't just a car driver issue. 90% of the cyclists and 75% of the pedestrians are also like "fuck it!", I don't care that the light is red, I'm crossing now. Fuck anyone who has the right of way. They'll have to wait". Add in the pedestrians who don't even look up from their phones as they cross on the red. Probably drivers doing this too.

I'm not making excuses for cars. They are obviously big and heavy and kill people. Rather I'm saying the attitude of "fuck you, I'm going" is ubiquitous, at least in some parts of the USA.

[jrockway]

Yeah, you should wait. The streets are for pedestrians and cyclists, car drivers can do whatever they need to do later. You can accelerate from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 5 seconds. We're walking around at 3mph if we're in a hurry.