One interesting fact that rarely gets brought up:

1 out of 3 pedestrian deaths involve drunk pedestrians.

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/pedestrian_safety/ind...

It's worth noting that non-US countries have lower fatalities, even with smartphone technology.

The major difference is that the consequence of being a bad pedestrian isn't death in most countries due to slower speeds and lower prevalence of SUVs.

I often see people arguing that US speed limits being high is fine, because the major killer is speed differential in a crash. The problem is, pedestrians walk at 3mph, so even a speed limit of 40mph on a road with pedestrians leads to a quite high speed differential between a car and a human.

I traveled extensively across most of Europe and also a bit of US. In the northern half of Europe pedestrians are crossing the streets in a very orderly manner, the entire summer I lived in Vienna I haven't seen a single pedestrian crossing a red light, not even on streets with almost no traffic. In the southern part things are different, but on average in Europe people pay more attention to crossing the streets than in US. That explains the lower fatalities.

Also in Europe people text less; I never understood the US preference for texting, in Europe we simply talk (many countries have affordable or unlimited voice plans). When I drive a car (10-20% of the time) I have a headset in my ear, when I ride the motorcycle I have a helmet headset turned on on auto-answer. I don't talk too often while driving, but it is less distracting than texting, I never have to touch the phone while driving (on the bike it is not even possible).

A somewhat cynical, hopefully wrong hypothesis: People in the US text more because we're further down the road of optimizing all human activity to maximize its monetary output, and the asynchronous and more impersonal nature of text messages allows us to transfer data to one another with less interruption to our productivity.

It's interesting to the extent that I always thought it was the opposite - that Europe was the one preferring texting, whereas the US didn't even have (or use much) the SMS service, using phones for just calls until mobile Internet came.

You can walk everywhere and live without a car in most big European cities. You cannot in US. That changes road design, urban planning, law interpretation, driving culture.

It's a catch 22. Nobody walks, so the social expectation is that the environment must accommodate driving, so the zoning and the laws reflect that, but the resulting environment is hostile to walking, so nobody walks.

There was an America before cars where walking was the norm, and then it was mostly systematically destroyed and is gone outside of a few metropolitan areas.

I agree with the point that pedestrians must watch the road (looking at traffic lights is not enough, you need to check wether cars are actually slowing down).

But to me it doesn't seem like people are more distracted than 10 years ago, so I'm not sure how that would increase pedestrian deaths.