Perhaps you didn’t notice, but there is a pedestrian fatality crisis happening right now in the United States. This phrase, “pedestrian fatality crisis,” sprouted up two years ago and has spread, weedlike, everywhere from New York magazine to the New York Review Of Books, with several other major media outlets in between. These outlets have a preferred solution to the crisis, of course: place additional restrictions on new cars, SUVs, and trucks, especially ones that would reduce the size, power, and capability of the vehicles available to the consumer.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has been exceptionally active in addressing this “crisis.” In April, it mandated manufacturers to make automatic emergency braking a standard in all vehicles by 2029. The new standard requires all cars to be able to stop at up to 62 mph and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them, and the systems must detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. The system must apply the brakes automatically at up to 90 mph when a collision with a lead vehicle is imminent and at up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected. These systems are difficult to implement and notoriously uneven in operation. They are already present in some luxury cars, where they are both unpredictable and dangerous. A few years ago, I had a new Aston Martin DBX become confused by a large pavement wave on I-94 near Detroit, at which point it forcibly brought me to a dead halt on a freeway where I was surrounded by tractor-trailers doing 80 mph. Exciting stuff. Really made me want to keep in better touch with the people I love.
In September, the agency went further, proposing a regulation that would effectively restyle and reengineer every new car, truck, and SUV in the U.S. to be less injurious to pedestrians. This regulation, which mirrors existing European law, will be astoundingly expensive and complex to implement in modern full-sized trucks and SUVs, most of which have not been sold in Europe since the pedestrian-impact laws went into force there. If implemented, this will be a major change in the appearance, function, and cost of the U.S.’s most popular vehicles.
Is it necessary?
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety publishes detailed figures regarding pedestrian fatalities. This data is used by the media and the government to justify an increased regulatory and cost burden on vehicle owners, but the most cursory look through what the report actually says, as opposed to how it is interpreted by regulators, is enough to make any sane person’s head spin.
The first problem a skeptical reader will spot is the notion that the U.S. is currently in the middle of a “pedestrian fatality crisis.” In 2022, 7,522 pedestrians were killed by motor vehicles. This is more than the modern recorded low of 4,109 in 2009, but it’s not a number that would be out of place for much of the last 50 years. If you perform the simple step of adjusting for the change in the U.S. population over time, the “crisis” becomes even more ephemeral. You are half as likely to be killed by a car as you were in 1975 and at not much more risk from a car than you are from accidental drowning. At most, pedestrian fatalities represent about two-tenths of 1% of the U.S.’s annual mortality.
All right, so it’s not a crisis per se, but there’s still a villain in this fairy tale. The conventional wisdom in our media is that “oversized” personal vehicles are responsible for the increase in pedestrian deaths. If this were the case, you might reasonably expect that the rural/urban ratio of those deaths would swing increasingly rural over the years as the size of F-150s and Chevy Tahoes increased. After all, those vehicles find most of their customers outside urban areas, and that is where their increased size would cause additional deaths. The IIHS data show something quite different. In 1975, just 59% of pedestrian deaths were urban. Today, that figure has risen to 85%. Based solely on this, one might reasonably suggest that rural pedestrians become safer every time Ford makes its pickup trucks larger, possibly because they are easier to see as a result. The real question that arises from the numbers might be phrased as: How are these oversized “bro-dozers” actually causing deaths in the cities they rarely inhabit? Don’t worry. There’s surely a social science professor out there who has a ready answer.
One figure that hasn’t changed much since 1975 is the sex ratio of pedestrian deaths, which has remained steady at between 68% and 71% in favor of men. The age ratios, on the other hand, have changed considerably. Children and people over the age of 70 are now far less likely to be killed by a motor vehicle. In their place, we have pedestrians between the ages of 20 and 44 who are now the lion’s share of deaths. Much has been written in the past about how pickup trucks are particularly dangerous to young pedestrians. The data, however, imply that children become dramatically safer as trucks get larger, with a 92% reduction in deaths from 1975 to the present day. That’s the only conclusion supported by the numbers, which strongly suggest that we would all be even better off if the trucks were still larger. Especially the children. Won’t someone think of them?
The IIHS report makes it amusing and easy to hoist various media culture-war truck-grabber types via their own PDF petard, but it is better used for taking a serious look at what actually results in pedestrian deaths. As previously noted, 20 to 44-year-olds are now the primary victims of fatal vehicle strikes. They are also perhaps the most distracted of pedestrians, an assertion for which compelling, if anecdotal, evidence can be easily obtained just by visiting New York City, Chicago, or indeed any city worthy of more than one art gallery.
Alternatively, maybe they just really like to drink. The percentage of struck pedestrians with high blood alcohol has shrunk from 61% at night and 27% during the day in 1982 to 37% and 23%, but this still accounts for a rough third of fatalities. A full 64% of deaths occur in the nine hours between 6 p.m. and 3 a.m., which could well be related to social activity besides drinking. Being a drunk or impaired pedestrian is far less illegal in most places than being a motorist in the same condition, but that does not mean it is guaranteed to be safe.
Rural pedestrian deaths mostly happen on highways and other roads with speed limits above 55 mph. Even the urban incidents are strongly biased toward roads with 35 mph limits or above, accounting for at least 76% of reported fatalities. The safest months for pedestrians are April through July. The worst is October, which, again, is more than half as deadly. Don’t let Slate or the NYRB find out about that last one because we will end up getting an article about “The Dangers Of ‘Trucktober’” or some such.
Think I’m kidding? Shortly after the NHTSA released its latest proposed ruling, Slate thundered that “The Solution to Giant Killer Cars Is Really, Really Simple.” Breezily dismissing new government regulations that will cost consumers billions of dollars, the magazine made its position plain: “The one reliable way to address the harms of gigantic SUVs and pickups is to stop building them.”
Just to drive the point home to the cheap seats, the article headline was changed after the fact to read “There Is No Technology Fix for Car Bloat.” Bloomberg was hardly any less hysterical, talking about “petro-masculinity” and complaining that “supersized trucks were often deployed as … weapons during the Trump era.” Forget the data. Forget the reality of how and why pedestrians die in the U.S. The important thing to do is to get the Ford F-250 and its competitors off the road.
Looking out my office window at the admittedly cetacean bulk of my very own Ford F-250 Platinum in its ridiculous coat of iridescent “Star White” paint, I can understand why someone might recoil at the sight of it, particularly if their own lifestyle doesn’t require ownership of, or access to, a pickup truck. That doesn’t mean it should be regulated out of existence to suit those people, especially if the basis for that regulation is a desire to improve pedestrian safety. We’ve all heard the chestnut about “not letting a crisis go to waste,” but there’s no crisis here, just a multibillion-dollar waste of time and effort during which pedestrians will continue to die for other, eminently fixable reasons.
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It’s one thing for the media to be hysterical about it, but the NHTSA should be better than that. Pedestrians and drivers deserve at least that much.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver and a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines who writes the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.