Some notes: Pedestrian fatalities are up in the last decade and there isn't a great smoking gun on why. The "every driver is starring at a smartphone" explanation doesn't have much evidence. The vast majority of pedestrian deaths happen at night, and not at an intersection. Almost all the additional pedestrian deaths are at night; daytime fatalities have been flat since 2008.
The general common-sense level of the population seems to have dipped, causing pedestrians to make stupid decisions, like running across a road at night(I see this a lot).
Pedestrians are also capable of being distracted by their phones.
That's an interesting point. Alcohol consumption and opioid consumption are both up over that period of time, and either the driver or the pedestrian consuming those could lead to more crashes.
Actually, one of the big changes in that report is that more pedestrians are drunk.
A drunk pedestrian is likely to indictate 1) nighttime, 2) walking in a target rich environment (most bars exist near other bars) and 3) lots of distracted Uber/Lyft drivers.
What is interesting is that Texas/Arizona/Florida/Georgia have increases in deaths that completely cancel out California's decrease.
I'll never forget the night I was cycling home from a bar, quite inebriated, and was passed with plenty of space (this was on a stroad) by a convertible (driven by a drunkard who'd just left the same bar) at high speed. Just after the car passed, my eye discerned in the dark another drunkard who just happened to have been crossing the road (not in an "official" crossing) right then. The car couldn't have missed him by more than six inches, and neither the pedestrian nor the driver even noticed. Holy shit.
That is an issue that was touched on in one of the Freakonomics books too: increased DUI enforcement has lead to many would-be drunk drivers instead being drunk pedestrians, which is much more dangerous (for the drunk).
We're getting into the realm of Trolly Problem-esque ethical thought experiments, but how many drunk pedestrians should be allowed to die to save one victim of drunk driving? Consider also that those dead pedestrians are often not really at fault, but just unable to avoid a bad driver due to poor reaction times that would also affect children and elderly pedestrians.
I'm not saying that driving drunk is ever morally acceptable, of course. There are just some interesting unintended consequences of public policy at play.
If pedestrian fatalities are up, and other traffic fatalities aren't (I don't know if that's true), I'd lean toward pedestrians are staring at their phones, rather than drivers. Personally, I walk around while reading all the time.
I assume driveways/parking lot entrances count as non-intersections. I pay attention when I cross an intersection while reading. I pay somewhat less attention (though not none) when passing the entrance to a parking garage or a driveway.
(But this is all conjecture. No data to back this up.)
Some notes: Pedestrian fatalities are up in the last decade and there isn't a great smoking gun on why. The "every driver is starring at a smartphone" explanation doesn't have much evidence. The vast majority of pedestrian deaths happen at night, and not at an intersection. Almost all the additional pedestrian deaths are at night; daytime fatalities have been flat since 2008.