Only one of the people in that interaction is wielding a deadly weapon. Perhaps the burden of responsibility should be slightly greater for the one who can kill half a dozen people with five seconds of inattention.
I think the burden of responsibility when there is an injury or death should fall on the car, because, yes, a ton of steel and plastic tends to win over a couple hundred pounds of meat and bone, and drivers should keep that in mind when driving.
But I think it's reasonable to expect pedestrians to take at least some responsibility for keeping safe. I'm primarily a pedestrian. I'll sometimes be doing something on my phone while walking on a sidewalk (though I try to keep even that to a minimum), but as soon as I'm about to step off a curb into the street, the phone goes away. I watch where I'm going, and where the cars around me are going, for however long I'm in the street.
I see plenty of people who are still buried in their phones while crossing the street, and it's just stupid. If they get hit and die while crossing the street, it's (probably) not their fault, but that's little consolation: they're still dead. If they could have prevented that by taking the entirely reasonable step of making sure they're aware of their surroundings, isn't it worth it? I'm talking about outcomes here, not responsibility. If you can do something to keep yourself safer, and that thing is an entirely reasonable, non-burdensome thing to do, then you should probably do it, no?
And that's what the parent's post was about, anyway: no one is talking about responsibility. It seems pretty likely to me that at least some of the increased rate of pedestrian-involved accidents can be attributed to increased pedestrian inattention.
Re the last sentence in your comment: the New York DOT performed an analysis that "found little concrete evidence that device-induced distracted walking contributes significantly
to pedestrian fatalities and injuries": https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/downloads/pdf/distraction-shou...
Interesting, but I'd like to see a broader study. Note that this was the New York City DOT, not the state DOT. The study does reference some national figures, but otherwise mostly focuses on NYC itself.
Given the volume of people walking around in NYC at most hours of the day, I'd expect a sort of "herd immunity" to come into play: sure, you might be on your phone, but you're surrounded by 15 other people while crossing the street, and a car is going to be hard pressed to not see all of you. At least one of those people is likely paying attention, at any rate.
Also I was a little confused by their conclusion, given this statistic in the linked report, under "Pedestrian Self-Reports of Distraction":
"Using emergency room data from 1,075 pedestrian injuries (2008–2011), researchers at Bellevue Hospital found that 7.7% of admitted pedestrians were using an electronic device at the time of the crash."
How is 7.7% not "significant"? I'm sure those 83 people would rather not have been in the emergency room, and maybe have changed their behavior for the better. And that's just injuries; obviously dead pedestrians can't self-report what they were up to in the moments leading up to their death. Also consider that 7.7% is a lower bound. While it's unlikely that someone would lie to say they were using a device when they weren't, it's likely that there are quite a few people who were actually using a device during the incident but didn't want to admit it out of embarrassment or fear of fault or blame being assigned to them (legally, even).
Because we rely on data that shows that in most injuries with pedestrians, pedestrian had the right of way. That’s just data. Cars are getting more dangerous, bigger, people are more distracted, and pedestrian deaths are increasing.
Your experience is anecdata. Just look at hard numbers.
