| Sorry, I don't understand what you mean. I'll try anyway to express my though again. As an example: The analysis by the Governors Highway Safety Association, a nonprofit that represents state highway safety offices, found that pedestrian deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic had spiked significantly, as speeding and impaired and distracted driving proliferated Now it would be incorrect to say that COVID-19 is dangerous for pedestrians, even though it happened due to COVID-19, the root cause has been speeding and impaired and distracted driving. In the same way population growth is not directly correlated linearly to an increase of the number of pedestrians fatalities. If, for example, a family of 2 moves into a new city but they never leave the house because they are both old and disabled, the population has grown, but the risks for pedestrians haven't. In the case I used in the previous comment, more people walking doesn't correlate with more fatalities, it's in fact the opposite. There are more people walking, true, but in a much safer space for them. So population growth makes sense as an health problem only if it produces more pedestrians, in particular more pedestrians at risk. For example an higher driver/pedestrian ratio, which in the end is the same thing of more pedestrians. To use a bad analogy, for which I apologize in advance, it doesn't matter if there are more "targets" for cars to hit or more cars are hitting more of the same number of "targets", the result is roughly the same. If we look at it as an health problem the only conclusion that makes sense is that the less pedestrians and other road vehicles cross their paths, the more pedestrians fatalities will go down, regardless of population growth. |