>I'm not singling out the pedestrians - the drivers are equally at fault.

Distracted walking isn't a crime, so surely it's not equal.

That's the definition of jaywalking - walking out into the street without regard for traffic.

If someone is distracted and gets under your car or bycicle and gets killed or otherwise causes you to crash killing you or killing others, would you still say it's not a crime?

It is if somebody gets killed. Recently a guy wearing headphones and listening (apparently) to his cell phone walked across the street against the light and directly in front of my car. He was completely oblivious that there was a light and didn't even hear me slam on the brakes to avoid hitting him.

You don't have sidewalks on streets with speeds of 50mph or more ?

Here in AZ if you walk in front of a car and get hit, it is your fault. Legally.

Arizona law does say that at no time, even when entering a crosswalk, should a pedestrian step out so quickly in front of a vehicle that a vehicle does not have time to come to a full stop.

https://www.breyerlaw.com/blog/pedestrian-accident/rules-of-...

Note we also have a "Stupid motorist law"

Virginia has a similar provision:

§ 46.2-924: ... No pedestrian shall enter or cross an intersection in disregard of approaching traffic. ...

Sadly, that clause is never enforced on pedestrians who do "enter or cross ... in disregard of approaching traffic". I've even seen some who seem to have some kind of personal death wish. They approach an intersection at full walking speed, do not even look to see what traffic is doing (and are not phone distracted either), do not slow down, and just burst out into traffic.

Yes, drivers bear a large responsibility here, given that they are operating the 3000+lb machine. But some enforcement of the statute clauses that already exist against the worst offenders on the pedestrian side, to reduce the incidents of pedestrian forcing their way in front of moving vehicles without regard to the presence of those vehicles, would also go a long way towards reversing the statistics direction.

Oh, that’s ok then, go ahead and mow them down.

You wrote "I'm not singling out the pedestrians - the drivers are equally at fault". The article highlights that we need to look at more than just pedestrians and drivers.

> In the UK, Belgium, Germany, Spain, France, Austria and Iceland, for example, pedestrian deaths occur at a per capita rate roughly half of America’s, or lower. Are we really to believe that the citizens of these countries are 50% less susceptible than Americans to distraction, by their phones or anything else? Plus, within the US, pedestrian death occurs disproportionately in neighbourhoods populated by people with low-incomes and people of colour. Is distraction really more endemic in those neighbourhoods, or among people driving through them, than it is in wealthier, whiter areas? Or is it more likely that these neighbourhoods are more likely to be criss-crossed by high-speed roads, and less likely to receive investment in transit interventions that protect pedestrians? Advertisement

> “All this talk about pedestrian distraction, driver distraction? It’s such a distraction,” says Ben Welle of the World Resource Institute for Sustainable Cities. “It puts all the responsibility on individuals, and none on the environment they operate in.”

While not mentioned in this article, the premise of Vision Zero (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero ) is "In most road transport systems, road users bear complete responsibility for safety. Vision Zero changes this relationship by emphasizing that responsibility is shared by transportation system designers and road users". Emphasis mine.

Did you read the article? The claim is that focusing on driver and pedestrian distraction is beside the point:

“All this talk about pedestrian distraction, driver distraction? It’s such a distraction,” says Ben Welle of the World Resource Institute for Sustainable Cities. “It puts all the responsibility on individuals, and none on the environment they operate in.”

This sort of false equivalence is depressingly common and is a big part of the denial that let's us ignore the actual issue... I mean the design of roads/cities to maximize traffic flow (for those that have not read the article).

So pedestrians have to stay on guard and avoid all distractions when they venture outside of their home, just because other people cannot move around without their petrol engine and one ton of steal?

The point of the article was _not_ to place blame on either drivers or pedestrians/cyclists. The article speaks about how the environments created in the US and Western Europe make for the right conditions to "trip" all humans, who naturally do get distracted (even despite their best efforts).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error >>In social psychology, fundamental attribution error (FAE), also known as correspondence bias or attribution effect, is the tendency for people to under-emphasize situational explanations for an individual's observed behavior while over-emphasizing dispositional and personality-based explanations for their behavior. This effect has been described as "the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are