American roads at night started to become deadlier for pedestrians in around 2009, the New York Times reports. Since 2009, fatalities have risen steadily, reversing the effects of decades of safety improvements. The main reason behind the rise are unclear; though analysts point to the rise in smartphones and complex dashboard displays, as well as the growing weight and force of vehicles themselves.
In 2021, more than 7,300 pedestrians died in America, three in four of them during the hours between sunset and sunrise. This trend exists on top of what is already a growing gap in roadway deaths between the U.S. and other countries. Speed limits on local roads are often higher in the U.S., laws and cultural prohibitions against dangerous driving can be weaker, and American infrastructure in many ways has been designed to enable speeding cars. Because of those baseline conditions, American roads — and the pedestrians walking along them — have been especially susceptible to potential new risks like smartphones and bigger vehicles.
Smartphones aren’t uniquely American, but the pervasiveness of automatic transmissions is, which helps free up a driver’s hand for other uses. Just 1% of all new passenger vehicles sold this year in the U.S. had manual transmissions. It’s perhaps not surprising then that Americans spend nearly three times as much time interacting with their phones while driving as drivers in Britain. Nationwide, the suburbanization of poverty in the 21st century has meant that more lower-income Americans who rely on shift work or public transit have moved to communities built around the deadliest kinds of roads: those with multiple lanes and higher speed limits but few crosswalks or sidewalks.