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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2026
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I don't think this is a useful comparison and I think it's a dishonest to present it this way.
You're trying to show that smartphones cause pedestrian deaths. This leaves out some very important info like figuring out if traffic accidents per mile driven have increased, if there are more pedestrians, the rates of death per accident and which kinds of vehicles are most associated with these deaths vs what people walk (or limp) away from.
From one of your sources, let's look at what that red line looks like in a different scale
. You've stretched that way out. Looks like the overall trend for non pedestrian deaths is going down over the long run. So pedestrian deaths are increasing while non pedestrian deaths are decreasing. No wait, this graph shows a huge increase in non pedestrian deaths!
But it does also show an increase in pedestrian deaths at around the same time, being shortly after the smartphone adoption, so couldn't it be said that distracted drivers are killing themselves and/or passengers, and pedestrians more since the smartphone gained popularity?
We could draw a bunch of conclusions that the data doesn't point at, sure. Show me the fatality rate per crash by vehicle manufacture year and I'm betting we'd see a steady trend downward.
Here's another graph that shows a change around 2010 that I could lay over the data that would correlate a rise in car sales with a rise in pedestrian deaths
And since the fatalities are in absolute numbers and not rate, the number of fatalities per car on the road might have been holding steady or going down. (Note that that graph has no sources, so you shouldn't take it at face value anyway)
Not trying to defend cars, just trying to call out massaging data to fit what one has already decided is true.