Really well earned use of 'hang on' there, sounds like the article is bollocks

This should have been the title of the post, or, if not, then a very close approximation of it.

What's worse is that going by the title alone I had suspected some clickbait-y foul play, because many of today's articles that rely on numbers or stats have start resorting to those tactics.

Otherwise you get silly things like their claim that New Hampshire has seen a whopping 150% increase in pedestrian deaths from 2021 to 2022.

They went from 2 to 5.

since "2019, the last pre-pandemic year, pedestrian fatalities have surged 18 percent in just three years – nine times faster than U.S. population growth," the report said.

Comparing the number of fatalities to population growth makes sense because one would increase naturally with the other.

The per capita or per 100,000 rise would be meaningful. You don't get the per capita rise by dividing the rise in fatalities by the rise in population growth.

I agree the numbers used in the article are not the most explicit, though.

It only makes sense if we compare the number of fatalities to number of pedestrians growth.

More people doesn't necessarily means more pedestrians.

For example: a car ban like there are in many European city centres, leads to a growth of the number of pedestrians in the area, not linked to a growth in the general population.

I'll try anyway to express my though again.

As an example: The analysis by the Governors Highway Safety Association, a nonprofit that represents state highway safety offices, found that pedestrian deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic had spiked significantly, as speeding and impaired and distracted driving proliferated

Now it would be incorrect to say that COVID-19 is dangerous for pedestrians, even though it happened due to COVID-19, the root cause has been speeding and impaired and distracted driving.

In the same way population growth is not directly correlated linearly to an increase of the number of pedestrians fatalities.

If, for example, a family of 2 moves into a new city but they never leave the house because they are both old and disabled, the population has grown, but the risks for pedestrians haven't.

In the case I used in the previous comment, more people walking doesn't correlate with more fatalities, it's in fact the opposite. There are more people walking, true, but in a much safer space for them.

So population growth makes sense as an health problem only if it produces more pedestrians, in particular more pedestrians at risk.

For example an higher driver/pedestrian ratio, which in the end is the same thing of more pedestrians. To use a bad analogy, for which I apologize in advance, it doesn't matter if there are more "targets" for cars to hit or more cars are hitting more of the same number of "targets", the result is roughly the same.

If we look at it as an health problem the only conclusion that makes sense is that the less pedestrians and other road vehicles cross their paths, the more pedestrians fatalities will go down, regardless of population growth.

> Is someone waiting for a bus or uber a pedestrian?

> Is someone walking in a parking lot to thier car a pedestrian?

I'm quite sure they are are literally not, the article uses the term "pedestrian" in the title but then it uses "walkers" in the text, it looks quite clear that they are referring to people walking on public spaces as a means of travel.

  pedestrian
  /pɪˈdɛstrɪən/
  noun: pedestrian; plural noun: pedestrians

  a person walking rather than travelling in a vehicle.

There's always better data, and making a study that doesn't have any spurious correlations is extremely expensive. Pedestrian growth is also not necessarily linearly correlated to pedestrian fatalities. If cities become more walkable, it could be that there are more pedestrians walking shorter distances. I would expect that to impact fatalities per pedestrian less than having more pedestrians walking the same amount.

This data just says that the growth in population isn't likely the direct cause of the effect. It could be a difference in the demographics of the population (new people walk more/less). It could be a difference in the existing pedestrians (i.e. % of pedestrians is constant, but people are walking at night or with headphones, etc). It could be a difference in the existing drivers (more dangerous cars, more dangerous driving, more DUIs, etc).

They have a clear anti-car agenda, they seem to be pro public transportation but even that's questionable

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2021/05/07/opinion-roll-back-cuo...