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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2026
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I saw a chart that showed a much stronger correlation with smart phones
Why not both?
If phones are causing more collisions... then bigger vehicles have more kinetic energy, hence more deaths...
The kinetic energy difference between a 180 pound person and a 3,000 pound vehicle or a 6,000 pound vehicle is completely irrelevant. The height of impact from a truck or suv is what makes it worse.
Either way, it's surely more like 90% cell phones distracting drivers than it is vehicle type.
A 3,000 punt vehicle will have a lot less braking distance than a 6,000 pound one.
A big vehicle like that has a lot more horizontal blind spot, it's been a major thing with drivers of those monstrosities literally not seeing kids, people in wheelchairs etc.
Most people are out of their depths with such big vehicles in many ways, they should require a specific license because it's such a different thing compared to a normal sized car in so many ways.
It's a real bad combination of way to big cars with all the negatives + phone and in car touch screen use. It's absolutely not 90% either of them, it's a combination.
This is also mostly American, no other country has cars like that in those numbers (per capita), and Americans also have a higher phone usage while driving percentage than most of the world.
I've been an EMT and firefighter for nearly 20 years, buddy. I'm on scene at these vehicle crashes. The drivers are usually so shaken by what's happened that they usually just straight up tell the truth if it to me. It's cell phones. It's almost always cell phones. "Texting spouse. Reading a text. Dropped my phone and was reaching for it. Changing songs on my phone. Just looked down at my phone for a moment. ".
I'm literally there and have seen the change for 20 years. Personally watched it. It's cell phones. Not your little opinion based on nothing but your flawed thoughts.
It's also almost never braking distance. All the bad wrecks and fatalities tend to never have much distance at all showing they applied brakes before contact. Bigger issue with suvs and trucks (aside from higher impact point I mentioned to begin with) in crashes is that they aren't as stable. Easier to roll over or lose control of them after jerking the steering wheel.
I completely agree about the cause of the accident, but there is actually a big correlation between vehicle height and accident mortality, the NYT published this report recently about it.
So it seems @9488fcea02a9@sh.itjust.works was actually correct and it's both.
Thats not how kinetic energy works, no pedestrian is heavy enough to stop any car, small or large.
Force= Mass X Acceleration, so any any given speed, more mass nets more force. More force = more trauma.
if you get hit by a wall with infinite weight, moving at 1km/h, it has infinite energy, yet it will merely push you away
A higher kinetic energy means the vehicle takes longer to stop from the same speed (that's true even with better brakes and better tires, because if you try to reduce the energy faster than a certain rate the vehicle just starts skidding) which in turn means collisions with pedestrians happen at a higher speed, which is more deadly.
I couldn't find a page of info for specifically light trucks, but here's one for trucks.
This is not to deny the effect of higher fronts and hence lower driver visibility, just to point out that kinetic energy too matters.
Bigger in the context of vehicles means not only heavier, but also a higher point of impact. It could be the difference between getting hit in the legs vs the torso. Or the difference between rolling onto the hood vs knocked down and run over.
I agree, large cars are generally much more lethal to pedestrians, due to their shape, not kinetic energy.
Kinetic energy is related to mass and the square of velocity
A heavier vehicle absolutely has more killing power against a pedestrian...
You're right. The mass of the pedestrian makes no difference... any vehicle is going to turn them into a red mist
You have it backwards. Larger vehicles of course have more energy, but pedestrians are too light for that to make a difference.
If you get hit by an oil tanker ship going ~1 kmh, that ship has orders of magnitude more kinetic energy than a car at highway speed, yet, unless theres a wall or something, the ship will merely push you harmlessly aside.
Its about the manner of delivery, not the vehicles energy.
Larger cars are more dangerous because they hit you higher up, where you have more vital organs.
The danger from higher kinetic energy comes from the longer break distance and time to stop: given the same driver reaction time and distance to the pedestrian, a heavier vehicle will take longer to break to a stop and thus have a higher velocity when it collides with that pedestrian than a lighter vehicle.
This is not to deny the difference that a higher front makes, just pointing out that kinetic energy does in fact make a difference, though of course as you point out not because of any "higher energy transmission on collision" or such, but rather indirectly because the vehicle is more likely to collide at a higher speed because it takes longer to break.
I couldn't find info on this for explicitly for light trucks, but here's some for trucks.
I don't think that we see the same increase in pedestrian fatalities in other countries though, which do have smart phones but do not have massive personal trucks.
In Europe:
In the US:
Not exactly the same years, of course, and comparing data sets is tricky.
The minima at 2009-2010 is absurdly clear though. You undid 20 years of progress in about 10 years. I'm honestly shocked - what happened in 2009 to cause this? I would think increasing truck sizes would cause a much more shallow minima, since truck sizes don't suddenly increase from one year to the next.
Dumb as fuck EPA emissions standards
...
That's not the EPA's fault, that's the fault of government that allows the loophole because trucks are high profit vehicles for Ford, GM and Stellantis.
The rise of smartphones with instant messengers might have contributed to that.
Texting and driving is a thing...
...which triggers a certain kind of rage/hate in me when I spot people doing that, which I usually do several times each day.
That also happens in Europe and yet you don't see a similar increase in pedestrian deaths.
What did not happen in Europe but did in the US during that time frame was the invasion of roads by personal tanks.
So many other variables though. European cities are designed so much better for pedestrians and cyclists. I’d argue that the driving standards are also higher in a lot of areas. Speeds often slower too since infrastructure is designed for mixed use. In North America the actual design of most roads is almost hostile to pedestrians. It’s clearly a mix a factors.
Such differences remained steady during that time frame, so whilst they explain the actual baseline levels, they don't explain the change in trend that happened in the US but not in Europe.
(What you suggest would only make sense if in 2009 the road infrastructure design, driving standards and average speeds became much worse in the US and kept getting worse, something not really supported by observation of those things)
The most logical conclusion is that something changed in one place that did not change in the other.
The biggest change that happened in the US but not in Europe in that time frame was the in the US the prevalence and size of light trucks increased massivelly but not at all in Europe. Further, as we see in this study such vehicles are far more dangerous to pedestrians, so this specific change that happens in one geographical zone but not the other does seem to be the most likely explanation. Certainly this is a lot more logical than an increase in mobile phone use whilst driving (as that also happened in Europe) or the better road conditions in Europe vs the US (as that didn't change even though the rate of pedestrian deaths in the US reversed its trend and started climbing up whilst in Europe it remained on a trend of slowing falling down)
Road speed has definitely increased since then. Cars are more powerful than ever and easier to drive blindly.
Road conditions have also changed. Europe has invested heavily in well designed infrastructure with a clearly stated goal of reducing road deaths.
Large vehicles in North America are clearly a major part of the problem but trying to be this reductionist seems pretty weird.
Road speed has definitely increased since 2009 exactly and by so much that the trend of falling pedestrian deaths in the US completelly turned around!????
Also I've actually lived in 3 countries of Europe since 2009 and beyond a handful of larger cities (such as Paris) closing a handful of streets and making them pedestrian only, pedestrian infrastructure has barelly improved in that period.
Absolutelly, Europe invested in much better infrastructure than the US, especially for pedestrians and cyclists, but that long predates 2009 - in fact Europe always had much more pedestrian-friendly infrastructure than the US, even in the most car friendly countries in Europe.
Methinks you're trying too to exculpate the huge increase in average car size in the US.
How do you get to that conclusion? I clearly state I believe it to be a major factor. I just don’t get why this place is so vehemently against confounding variables. It reads the same as US propaganda but opposite. Yeah, trucks bad, US bad. It’s just clearly not so simple. The US is huge and a rural town and major city have little in common. The trend is everywhere.
You can believe what you want but data from the ETSC (European Transport Safety Council) and ERSO (European Road Safety Observatory) is pretty clear. Reducing it to little cars is really slighting what Europe has accomplished. Car size is important but there has been so much more done. Little things like moving money from heavy vehicle corridors to raised sidewalks have both immediate (like visibility of pedestrians) and emergent effects (like driving culture changes).
This place is getting worse than Reddit.
You may be right, but as with the trucks, I would expect a much less sharp minima: Smartphone and instant messaging adoption didn't happen all at once, but from this graph we see that we're going from a substantial year-on-year decrease directly to a large year-on-year increase. A change that is gradually adopted over the course of several years can't really cause that kind of effect.
The instant messengers on the smart phones might have played a critical role. Whatsapp started in 2009.
Texting and driving is a thing, so there's a way to derive causation and not only correlation from that.
...it triggers a certain kind of rage/hate in me when I spot people texting and driving, which I usually do several times each day.