The New York Times published Nov. 3, 2022:
“I’m smart enough to know if cars are coming,” said one walker who is glad the old law will come off the books on Jan. 1.
Starting Jan. 1, thanks to the “Freedom to Walk” act, people in California will no longer have to worry so much about making a legal misstep when they are safely crossing a street. Signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom, the act was designed to give pedestrians in the state more leeway. No longer will they be charged with an infraction or fined for crossing outside designated intersections — with the caveat that police officers may still give tickets to pedestrians who are creating a safety hazard, in their view.
Dec. 11, 2023, the New York Times reports:
Why Are So Many American Pedestrians Dying at Night?
Sometime around 2009, American roads started to become deadlier for pedestrians, particularly at night. Fatalities have risen ever since, reversing the effects of decades of safety improvements. And it’s not clear why.
What’s even more perplexing: Nothing resembling this pattern has occurred in other comparably wealthy countries. In places like Canada and Australia, a much lower share of pedestrian fatalities occurs at night, and those fatalities — rarer in number — have generally been declining, not rising.
This explosion in pedestrian deaths occurs in just one racial group in America – blacks.
The most striking aspect is that the black pedestrian death rate has almost doubled since its low during the Great Recession. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, economic hard times tend to reduce deaths by traffic accident and homicide. This makes sense if you think of them as Deaths of Exuberance, more common when people have ample cash in their wallets.
By 2014, the black pedestrian death rate was back up to the level seen during the housing bubble of 2007, but growth was slowing. Then came the Ferguson Effect, as The Establishment warned cops not to police so proactively, and the black death rate shot upward as motorists sped more and packed more pistols. Indeed, the Ferguson Effect started in Ferguson, Missouri, when officer Darren Wilson shouted at jaywalker Michael Brown to get out of the street and back on the sidewalk.
Growth slowed somewhat in the late 2010s, but then came the Floyd Effect of the 2020s.
Among Hispanics, pedestrian deaths fell sharply with the bursting of the Housing Bubble. (It’s likely that many of the most marginal Latinos returned to Mexico when construction jobs evaporated.) As with homicides, Hispanics didn’t get the message as rapidly as blacks did about the racial reckoning, so their death rate peaked in 2022 rather than in 2021.
Whites have been slowly degenerating for a decade and a half, but didn’t rapidly respond to the racial reckoning.
Asians have kept their pedestrian death rate more or less flat for a decade and a half.
…What would save lives in the short term is going back to the more active policing of bad drivers and bad walkers that we had before we gave Black Lives Matter veto power over law enforcement.
