Why pedestrian deaths in the US are at a 40-year high

Phones, automatic transmission, so we have a free hand to use the phone, and huge dangerous roads built with no care for pedestrian safety.

It’s no single thing, but a mix of things that feed on each other, and create a terribly dangerous situation. 

Are phones also causing the simultaneous increase in cyclist deaths? Obviously not.

Or is the answer simpler than that - is it the rise of SUVs which don't have to comply with normal vehicle safety standards?

It's simple, and not really helpful to just blame individual drivers. Obviously, if you carelessly run over a pedestrian cause you are busy texting, it's your fault, but there are many other things at play. That's basically the same as saying obesity is the fault of people eating too much. It's true, but it's also misleading.

There's a system called the "hierarchy of controls" that is used in occupational and industrial applications to address hazards. The idea is to solve as many things as possible at the highest level of controls, so that you reduce reliance on lower level controls.

The hazard is that high velocity transportation can result in injury of death.

The first level of control is elimination of the hazard. Obviously we can't get rid of travel, but we can get rid of a lot of it by designing our cities to put all the things people need (jobs, groceries, leisure) close to where they live. We can promote remote work. Less distance traveled on a population level means less death.

The second level of control is substitution. In this case, that might mean switching people to safer modes of transit. Trains, bikes, walking, etc. Less distance driven means less death.

The third level is engineering controls. This is things like having cars be physically disconnected from where pedestrians, cyclists, etc are. Bollards, pedestrianized zones, separate bike routes, etc. Also in this category are things like speed bumps and traffic calming measures like narrowed or curving streets. Design features of cars can be engineering controls, too. Lower height vehicles, vehicles with pedestrian warning systems, etc. Less interaction between cars and people means less death.

The fourth level is administrative controls. This is things like speed limits, stop lights and signs, cross walks, drunk driving laws, texting while driving laws, etc. These all rely on rules to be followed, which is a fairly inefficient way to operate.

The last level is personal protective equipment. This would be things like reflectors on pedestrian clothing, helmets on cyclists, etc.

When cars first became common, and deaths started to creep up in number. Auto manufacturers refused to improve design to be safer, because that would mean acknowledging that design could be considered at fault. If everyone drove perfectly, there would be no deaths, right? So they just blamed drivers and pedestrians instead. BP did the same thing by popularizing the concept of a personal "carbon footprint". The plastics industry (among other companies) popularized the idea of "littering" as a thing individual people did that was wrong to distract from the fact they they were making all of the trash in the first place. Ever hear the Smoky the Bear slogan, "only you can prevent forest fires"? How about "only concerted international effort to reduce the effects of anthropogenic climate change can prevent forest fires"?

By focusing on drivers, you are doing the same thing as all those corporations.

You can always count on people to be irresponsible, selfish, and reckless. So yeah its bad road design to count on people to be safe, when they just aren't.

The study does not only blame road design, which is a big problem, but they also discuss the American culture of in car smartphone use, particularly because American cars are far more likely to have automatic transmissions than their peer counterparts, such as Europe, where manual transmissions are far more likely (74%). As a result, Americans have a free hand available while driving to use their smart phones, where those in countries with prevalent manual transmissions do not.

Contributing factors include the American surge in homelessness, as those types of people tend to hang around the most dangerous roads at night and in numbers. 

So why do road deaths happen at dramatically different rates in different countries that have very different transportation design?

Is it a better explanation that the Netherlands has road designs that better promote safety, or more conscientious drivers?

It's not excusable to run someone over because they weren't looking.

Drivers are incased in a tonne of steel, they should always be aware of the danger they pose to pedestrians. It's criminal how light drivers are treated when they crash, even when they are fully at fault.