[potato3732842]

People lay the blame on children and their parents because if they choose to do their best bipedal impression of a deer there's really nothing a driver can do. One could be going 10mph and if a child darts out from parked cars at the right time you're gonna hit them. Heck, adults get hit by forklifts and other heavy equipment going single digit speeds all the time and even workplaces that separate traffic nearly completely don't eliminate them at scale.

Ignoring extremists is easier than preventing (or reducing to a point that you stop complaining) these accidents at the limit, so that's what society does. Tough luck.

[Der_Einzige]

The average car driver is NOT putting enough active attention into their driving and could in many cases break fast enough to prevent the accidents that do happen. Furthermore, the average car driver has not been trained on how to actually handle extremely rapid braking situations. A lot of people are downright wusses about dealing with the "whiplash" of actually hard braking their cars. I'd even claim that over half of all drivers have not seriously applied their brakes at 100% at a speed above 20mph EVER!

Slow reaction times, of the kind that could be easily corrected by more strict laws around who and how licenses are given, are easily the #1 reason for preventable pedestrian deaths from cars.

This is a solvable problem and the Euros have far less of these stupid kinds of situations for a reason. I WILL blame most drivers who "kill children" for their laxidazy assumption that they can reduce their idle concentration just because "it hasn't happened to them".

Also all of this discourse is really arguments for requiring all cars to have active automatic emergency braking for pedestrians and other cars.

[CalRobert]

Reducing speed limits to 30 kph where there might be kids running out from between vehicles is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, yet drivers oppose this.

[otikik]

SUVs parked on the side of the street make it difficult to see even adults as they try to cross the street. It’s not the humans doing a reindeer impression, it’s the cars doing a forest impression