Earlier this year, my wife witnessed a pedestrian being hit by a car on our city street in Maryland. It wasn’t tragic and no-one got badly hurt but the event was in some ways enlightening. There’s a four-way crossing with a bit complicated arrangement for the traffic lights. There’s a moment when all lights are red, both for cars and pedestrians, from all directions. This gives pedestrians the temptation to start crossing just when one of the lights for cars turns green. This is what happened this time around, too: a mother with a young daughter made the wrong decision to start crossing just when the driver saw it was her turn. The driver was in hospital scrubs, perhaps a doctor on her way to work, given that she was driving a Mercedes. She bumped lightly into the mother who fell, but quickly got up. Nevertheless, the police arrived a few minutes later.
The New York Times did a widely publicized study a couple of months back about pedestrian deaths in the USA going up. They found that in 1980, pedestrian deaths in the US started to decline sharply, but three decades later this trend was reversed and has been going up since then. In this respect, the US is bucking the international trend of declining accidents involving pedestrians.
When it comes to overall traffic deaths (not only
pedestrians), deaths per capita and per distance driven are highest in Africa.
However, the US is an anomaly when it comes to advanced industrial societies.
In the US, there were 12.9 traffic deaths per 100,000 people. This compares
unfavorably with all European countries (e.g., in the UK, the number is 2.9; in
Finland 3.8; in France 5.0; and in Sweden only 2.2), Australia (4.1) and Japan
(2.5). Now, especially if you’re American, you would retort that Americans
drive more. But the ratio remains even if compared with distances driven: USA 8.3
deaths per 1 billion vehicle-kilometers vs. 5.2 in Australia, 5.1 in Finland,
5.8 in France, 4.4 in Japan, 3.3 in Sweden, and 3.8 in the UK. By any measure,
thus, traffic is more deadly in the US than in peer countries.
In 2021, 7,300 pedestrians died in the USA, three-quarters of them at nighttime. The NYT article put forth a number of reasons why this was happening. One reason is that speed limits on local roads in the US are often higher than in other countries. Another obvious one is that American infrastructure was built for cars, as opposed to countries where cities predate cars. NYT also suggests that US laws and cultural norms don’t penalize dangerous driving.
An important factor identified by the Times reporter, which also coincides perfectly with the timing of increased pedestrian deaths about 15 years ago, is the prevalence of smartphones. In the same period, car dashboards and control systems have become more complicated, especially with the rise of hybrid and electric vehicles. Both of these factors mean that drivers can become quite distracted fiddling with their electronic screens. I might add to the technological factor that cars have also become more quiet making their approach less obvious to pedestrians.
Each of these reasons is a likely partial explanation. I’d like to focus on the cultural dimension.
The Times article points out that there has been a geographical and demographic shift where more people have moved to the sunbelt in the south where urbanization came later and roads and cities were built particularly for cars. Data show that in the older cities (like New York City or Chicago), pedestrian deaths have actually fallen but they have risen steeply in suburbs where sidewalks and public transit options are lacking. This is combined with the “suburbanization of poverty” whereby poorer people and immigrants often have been pushed out from city centers and have to walk along big roads to get to work. They also often have to walk during dark hours when they are hard to spot.
A friend of mine lives in a Virginia suburb not far from the capital. Their community is intersected by a big road on which speeds are often quite fast. As there is perhaps a kilometer between the traffic lights where pedestrians can cross, the residents petitioned the county to establish another pedestrian crossing between the two existing ones. The county sheriff didn’t allow this on the grounds that it would “encourage risky behavior by pedestrians.” Crossing the street on foot in one’s own neighborhood to reach shops and services is considered too risky and inconveniencing drivers.
But even in urban areas like ours where sidewalks exist and walking is common, the general mindset is that cars go first. Might makes right. This is the polar opposite of how things are seen in Europe where pedestrians in cities always have the right of way. I remember decades ago when I was attending driving school in Helsinki, I got slammed by the instructor for the fact that I only slowed down to let a pedestrian cross the road, instead of stopping fully. (That is another difference: In the US, few people ever go to driving school. They just learn with an older family member, then go to the department of motor vehicles and take a multiple choice test. Consequently, many drivers never internalize the rules of traffic.) Irrespective of the speed limit, in places like Finland the authorities judge that your situational speed was too high if you were not able to stop before hitting a pedestrian. You will get fined for that. Here it is not so. Cars drive fast, are hard and heavy, and therefore you have to give them way.
There’s a traffic rule that is uniquely American: the right to make a right turn against a red light. I’ve heard men say how great this is because it gives so much flexibility and reduces wait times. However, the rule is widely abused and few drivers remember that it still means that you’ll first have to stop at the red light to see whether there’s anyone coming from the left. Instead, people often just turn into the middle of a stream of cars forcing others to give way, as if it were the birth right of the person coming from behind the red light. At busy intersections there are “no turn on red” signs and even traffic light arrows that turn red, but these have little or no impact on many drivers. Needless to say, if there’s a pedestrian or a biker with the right of way, such drivers couldn’t be bothered to watch out for them. A former biking colleague of mine has been knocked over at least twice by drivers who didn’t recognize the equal rights of a bicycle on the street.
I remember years ago when living in Brooklyn, NY – another urban area with proper sidewalks where people walk everywhere – I was walking home from the subway. I was crossing at a zebra crossing in the same direction I was walking when a car turned right and almost hit me. The driver, a young white hipster-looking fellow, screamed at me from his window: “Watch out! If I wasn’t paying attention, you’d be dead.” I guess I should be happy that he was paying attention while speeding through a city block in his metal box (even if it was a Mini).
Another factor also identified by the NYT research is that Americans drive extraordinarily large vehicles and that their size has been steadily growing in the past 15 years. As cars get larger and heavier they also become far deadlier to those they hit. Furthermore, they have longer brake distances and are harder to handle. Even in the city where there can be no need for such a large vehicle, I often observe soccer moms driving a massive Chevy Suburban or Ford Expedition. It’s often hard to even detect a small lady from the cockpit of the truck.
In 2023, the list of best selling cars, trucks and SUVs in the USA was topped by three massive trucks: Ford F-series, Chevy Silverado and Dodge Ram pickup (weighing between 1,800 and 3,100 kg). In Finland, in contrast, the top-3 the year before were Toyota Yaris, Toyota Corolla and Toyota RAV4; the two first ones being small compact cars (489-710 kg). A friend of mine who moved back to the Netherlands from Washington, DC, decided to sell his Prius because in his country it was considered unnecessarily large.
I claim that this trend towards larger and larger vehicles is also culturally determined. It sits well with the American image of a frontier man or woman, ploughing his own way forward irrespective of what or who comes in their way.
At the risk of stereotyping, there are certain kinds of drivers that may be more aggressive than average. One category consists of people driving luxury vehicles, possibly because such persons may feel entitled or just want to show off. There is some evidence for this. A research team supported by the Academy of Finland found that there are two types of people who drive what they called “high-status” cars: disagreeable men and conscientious people. (Their research was published in the peer reviewed International Journal of Psychology with subtle title, Not only assholes drive Mercedes.) Even after controlling for wealth, these two characteristics stood out in statistically significant form. The researchers, led by Prof. Jan Erik Lönnqvist, concluded that “certain personality traits, such as low agreeableness, may be associated with both unethical driving behaviour and with driving a high-status car.”
This research is in a way confirmed in a 2023 report by a Finnish insurance company that found that BMWs and Audis top the list of cars that are involved in traffic accidents in Finland, with over 20% more accidents compared with other car brands. When it comes to collissions with animals (Finland has a lot of deer and other wildlife right outside of cities), BMWs are the unfortunate leaders, while Audis come second in this dubious list with 15% less collisions.
I also suspect a general American characteristic, which may be a trait stemming all the way from the kinds of immigrants this country attracted hundreds of years ago. The Europeans who voluntarily moved to the New Continent were not a random selection of Europeans. No, there was a preselection of people who were individualistic risk takers seeking their fortunes on the new frontier. While many were forced to leave due to food shortages caused by bad harvest, many were escaping established hierarchies back home, some being misfits in the more staid European societies. Even today, the USA is known for its emphasis on individual action and a me-first attitude. This may have produced many good things along the way, but when it comes to traffic behavior it does not emphasize safety. In fact, incidents of aggression, even road rage are a regular feature when driving in the States.
This cultural trait also makes Americans overall a very impatient lot. Drivers feel certain of their own rights. Bikers think that traffic rules don’t apply to them, so they seldom stop at red lights and feel free to ride against the traffic on one-way streets or jump on the sidewalk when convenient. For most pedestrians, it seems to be psychologically impossible to wait for the light to turn green. This impatience and sense of entitlement appears to have been the cause of the accident that my wife witnessed, when a mother and daughter ran against the red light just as an impatient driver stepped on the gas.
