In 2023, cars and their drivers killed 8,820 American pedestrians and bicyclists — 7,314 pedestrians and 1,166 cyclists. They injured another 136,281 “nonoccupants,” as National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data refers to people outside of cars and motorcycles, an increase of over 5,300 injuries from 2022. Everyone can agree that this is bad, which is why so many organizations have committed themselves to curbing road deaths. The problem is how those organizations, from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration itself to NPR, are addressing the issue: Telling the pedestrians and cyclists how to alter their behavior to better accommodate cars. It’s victim-blaming, it’s bull, and it’s not the solution we need.
Car drivers are often inattentive or distracted — an issue that driver-assistance systems are exacerbating — and on the surface, telling pedestrians how to account for that is a good way to ensure their safety. Think about it a little more, though, and focusing on the pedestrians ignores the core issue at play. We shouldn’t resign ourselves to a world of terrible drivers careening around in ever-heavier boxes of metal, running through pedestrians with reckless abandon and facing only the lightest slaps on the wrist (if not outright glorification). We deserve better.
It’s not necessarily car drivers’ fault
Car drivers are not generally Bond villains behind the wheel, looking to cause maximum damage every time you drive to work. But they are, near-universally, victims of their own selective attention — the phenomenon addressed in the video above. Selective attention is where a person’s brain filters out pesky little things like “pedestrians” when they’re behind the wheel because those people outside hulking cars don’t pose a threat. It’s an inconvenience of human evolution, the very survival instinct that allowed us to live long enough that we might invent the car now makes us kind of bad at operating it, even those of us who pass the United States’ famously rigorous and difficult road tests. This, then, brings us to the real issue behind road deaths: Our American reliance on automobiles.
The easy solution to inattentive drivers is stricter licensing requirements, treating driving as a privilege rather than a right. But the United States is a bunch of automotive lobbyists in a trench coat, and there are precious few alternatives to driving, especially outside of dense urban areas. We can’t stop bad drivers from driving because they’d have no other way to get around. The solution to pedestrian deaths isn’t “defensive walking,” as NPR says, but investment in public transit. Don’t give us advice on how best to play Frogger on roads full of texting drivers, give us buses that give those drivers a safer place to text.
