Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Sometime around 2009, American roads started to become deadlier for pedestrians, particularly at night. Fatalities have risen ever since, reversing the effects of decades of safety improvements. And it’s not clear why.
What’s even more perplexing: Nothing resembling this pattern has occurred in other comparably wealthy countries. In places like Canada and Australia, a much lower share of pedestrian fatalities occurs at night, and those fatalities — rarer in number — have generally been declining, not rising.
In America, these trends present a puzzle that has stumped experts on vehicle design, driver behavior, road safety and how they interact: What changed, starting about 15 years ago, that would cause rising numbers of pedestrian deaths specifically in the U.S. — and overwhelmingly at night?
“This is something that, quite frankly, our profession missed,” Rebecca Sanders, the founder of Safe Streets Research and Consulting, said of the toll of nighttime deaths. “I think we missed that for a long time.”
In 2021, more than 7,300 pedestrians died in America — three in four of them during the hours between sunset and sunrise.
This trend exists on top of what is already a growing gap in roadway deaths between the U.S. and other countries. Speed limits on local roads are often higher in the U.S., laws and cultural prohibitions against dangerous driving can be weaker, and American infrastructure in many ways has been designed to enable speeding cars.
Those baseline conditions may mean, researchers suggest, that American roads — and the pedestrians walking along them — have been especially susceptible to potential new risks like smartphones and bigger vehicles.
But even that is only part of the picture.
“I don’t have any definitive answers for this,” said Jessica Cicchino, the vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Ms. Cicchino, like many observers, has puzzled over how rapidly nighttime deaths have risen. “What is it that’s happening specifically in the dark?”
Once You See the Truth About Cars, You Can’t Unsee It
In American consumer lore, the automobile has always been a “freedom machine” and liberty lies on the open road. “Americans are a race of independent people” whose “ancestors came to this country for the sake of freedom and adventure,” the National Automobile Chamber of Commerce’s soon-to-be-president, Roy Chapin, declared in 1924. “The automobile satisfies these instincts.” During the Cold War, vehicles with baroque tail fins and oodles of surplus chrome rolled off the assembly line, with Native American names like Pontiac, Apache, Dakota, Cherokee, Thunderbird and Winnebago — the ultimate expressions of capitalist triumph and Manifest Destiny.
But for many low-income and minority Americans, automobiles have been turbo-boosted engines of inequality, immobilizing their owners with debt, increasing their exposure to hostile law enforcement, and in general accelerating the forces that drive apart haves and have-nots.
In the consumer arena, cars have become tightly sprung debt traps. The average monthly auto loan payment crossed $700 for the first time this year, which does not include insurance or maintenance costs. Subprime lending and longer loan terms of up to 84 months have resulted in a doubling of auto loan debt over the last decade and a notable surge in the number of drivers who are “upside down”— owing more money than their cars are worth. But, again, the pain is not evenly distributed. Auto financing companies often charge nonwhite consumers higher interest rates than white consumers, as do insurers.
The pathway that leads from a simple traffic fine to financial insolvency or detention is increasingly crowded because of the spread of revenue policing intended to generate income from traffic tickets, court fees and asset forfeiture. Fiscally squeezed by austerity policies, officials extract the funds from those least able to pay. This is not only an awful way to fund governments; it is also a form of backdoor, regressive taxation that circumvents voters’ input.
Deadly traffic stops, racially biased predatory lending and revenue policing have all come under public scrutiny of late, but typically they are viewed as distinct realms of injustice, rather than as the interlocking systems that they are. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it: A traffic stop can result in fines or arrest; time behind bars can result in repossession or a low credit score; a low score results in more debt and less ability to pay fines, fees and surcharges. Championed as a kind of liberation, car ownership — all but mandatory in most parts of the country — has for many become a vehicle of capture and control.