The biggest car news and reviews, no BS
Our free daily newsletter sends the stories that really matter directly to you, every weekday.
- U.S. pedestrian deaths are rising. Despite global smartphone use, only America sees a significant increase in fatalities.
- Europe and Japan show declines. These regions maintain safer roads despite similar tech adoption.
- Distracted driving isn’t the sole cause. Data suggests other factors contribute to America’s unique issue.
- Global comparisons highlight the problem. Countries like Canada and Australia don’t mirror U.S. trends.
Bottom line: America’s pedestrian safety crisis is unique, with rising fatalities not solely explained by smartphone use.
AI assisted, editor reviewed
Just recently, the New York Times published a rather damning study about America’s simmering pedestrian safety crisis. Perhaps you saw our coverage; perhaps you read about it elsewhere. Perhaps you’re one of the many with a particularly strong opinion on the subject. We’ve certainly heard from our fair share of you. At the moment I’m writing this, that story has more than 260 comments and climbing, just on our site alone.
And a lot of them say a variant of the same thing: “It’s the cell phones, stupid!”
Is it, though? Look, it’s a perfectly reasonable argument at face value. The iPhone was introduced in 2007; pedestrian deaths in the United States began ticking up roughly two years later—and peaked during the pandemic. I get it; I was on my phone for most of that too.
There’s even data to back up this common sense assertion. Some kind redditor went so far as to overlay a chart of pedestrian deaths, vehicle weight and U.S. cell phone adoption all in the same handy-dandy visualization. And it would all check out beautifully if it weren’t for one little catch: They have cellphones outside the United States too.
What does that have to do with anything? Simple: If cell phones are responsible for the uptick in pedestrian deaths, that trend should be visible wherever smartphone adoption and car ownership overlap—the world’s powerhouse economies, in other words. If you’ve made it this far, you’ve probably already guessed what I’m going to say next: The math ain’t mathing.
Data sourced from https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb/en/Table?IndicatorCode=59 and plotted with Google Sheets; visualization augmented by Gemini.
Since we like visualizations, here’s one more. The above is based on public data from the UN Economic Commission for Europe (and the U.S. stats are backed up by NHTSA), and it paints a pretty obvious picture.
Don’t like my slopped-up trend lines? Don’t worry; others have already covered the same ground, and in far greater detail. No matter whose lines you look at, they all point the same direction, and it’s not the right one.
In 2013, total pedestrian deaths in the United States and Western Europe were roughly equal. That was four years into the reported uptick in pedestrian fatalities here in America, and as we can see, Europe’s steady downward trend has continued largely unabated, apart from an uptick in 2016. As of 2021, America’s pedestrian fatality figure was more than double that of Western Europe’s; according to IIHS, things haven’t changed much since.
The picture doesn’t change outside of Europe. Japan, which has struggled with pedestrian safety due to its historically dense development, has likewise seen a downward trend in fatalities during the same period, and it has adopted a very pedestrian-first safety culture. Australia has been dealing with an uptick since the pandemic, but is not showing the same trend as the U.S.A. Neither, for that matter, is Canada.
China, meanwhile, represents a bit of a black box. One estimate put the country’s pedestrian fatality rate as high as 17 per 100,000, which may not seem so bad in the abstract, but it would suggest that walkers and cyclists are being killed at a rate that would have appalled residents of America’s urban centers during the 1920s, where the wide availability of automobiles pushed that number up to 12 in 100,000; today, America’s pedestrian fatality rate sits around 2.3. These are signs of explosive industrialization, certainly, and likely not attributable directly to the number of Chinese citizens glued to TikTok.
Is distracted driving (and walking/cycling) a problem? Certainly. But is it the reason why America’s roads are becoming increasingly unfit for pedestrians and cyclists? Feel free to decide for yourself, but the numbers rarely lie.
Got a story tip? Let us know at tips@thedrive.com!
Byron is an editor at The Drive with a keen eye for infrastructure, sales and regulatory stories.
