It feels like this infrastructural risk is media driven to the extent of "pedophile kidnappers" or "razor blades in apples". For example I grew up in an Eastern MA "suburb" in the mid 90s - early 2000s, characterized by narrow winding roads, fast drivers, and no streetlights. Everyone too young or unconnected to have car access bicycled or walked everywhere; parents were a bit fearful but ultimately acquiescent ("better dead than dumb, and if you're not dumb you won't die"), and cops only cared about trespassing with intent to vandalize.
Over the intervening years, the town added nice wide sidewalks (previously none), fancy crosswalk infrastructure, lighting, and started enforcing speed limits extremely aggressively. Yet the number of people on foot and bike dwindled to almost nothing and now the only ones are older middle aged folk walking their dogs.
Dunno about that city in particular but in general car deaths have been increasing over the past decades, presumably because cars keep getting bigger and heavier. It’s a lot safer for kids to cross the street when everyone’s driving a Taurus than when everyone’s driving a modern Toyota Tundra
Is it that the percentage of accidents resulting in fatality has increased, or that the raw number of accidents has gone up overall? Is it just a simple function of more cars on the road, and the compounding effects of such?
The example of the Tundra is legit. Trucks keep getting bigger. It's not really because people all want a bigger truck though, it's because the government outlawed the compact trucks with CAFE and any remaining compact truck import options that might have satisfied CAFE had the shit taxed out of them with the chicken tax. It's a major reason for increased death in pedestrian by truck.
No clue whether that source of data is any good, and what the rates outside of the Us are. Just FYI, I don't like car centric places either, and that's part of the reason I probably couldn't live in the US.
The source may be correct, but it’s not useful. To judge the risk you’d need a breakdown of where accidents happen - it may be the case that motorways have become much safer due to safer cars, but pedestrians and cyclists suffered.
Especially modern pickups and SUVs have an increased risk of severe injuries for pedestrians due to the high front area which hits vulnerable body parts where a station wagon would hit legs. You’ll likely find two or more overlapping trends.
Yep, I grew up in the woodsy part of Framingham up by Route 20. A whole bunch of those roads are outright dangerous. My parents groused about how dangerous it was, but mostly trusted me not to be stupid.
Good on your n=1 data, but pedestrian fatalities have been steadily increasing for the last decades.
Also, nothing to do with "being stupid", if there are cars going 60mph right next to where you're walking, it's the luck of the draw whether you get decapitated by a truck or not.
I feel you, but this is clearly a “correlation is not causation” type situation. Infrastructure should be people-centric, and there’s nothing wrong with doing things to reduce car speed and make the built environment safe. It is unlikely that improved infrastructure resulted in people walking and biking less, which is what the wording of your post suggests.
(Also, love your username… I thought I was the only one. ;-) )
I'd actually read it more as asserting the populace has been been so influenced by this media hysteria that even though all this stuff got built, nobody uses it because they've become fundamentally unwilling to let their children walk--and perhaps not very willing to do so themselves.
GP mentioned the safety-related improvements to demonstrate exactly how irrational being scared in their particular community was, and perhaps to lament the wasted effort and money a bit. The before/after was to illustrate the populace was so affected by whatever's happening they actually regressed from previously being very willing to walk in worse conditions.
At least I did until the response you got that didn't say exactly the same. But I still suspect that was the gist, in the original context, and it just got a bit lost in rebuttal.
Presumably the infrastructure development itself was not causative, but, the trend occurred nonetheless over roughly the same time course as the development.
Over the intervening years, the town added nice wide sidewalks (previously none), fancy crosswalk infrastructure, lighting, and started enforcing speed limits extremely aggressively. Yet the number of people on foot and bike dwindled to almost nothing and now the only ones are older middle aged folk walking their dogs.