Cars now have sensors all over and automatic braking to prevent collisions. The article acknowledges the benefits of front facing sensors in luxury vehicles from the time it was written, which are very common today even in basic vehicles. So are the 360 cameras it mentions.
Also - this article is focused on data from 2016 to 2020 for front collisions. It mentions 744 deaths of children in front collisions on non public roads (where the blind spots it talks about matter more) in that 5 year period, which is frankly a small number. This is a country with a few hundred million people after all. Some number of deaths are inevitable and it isn’t a crisis.
> Cars now have sensors all over and automatic braking to prevent collisions.
Yet pedestrian deaths in the US have kept climbing over the past ten years or so.
I can tell you that as a lifelong pedestrian I do not feel remotely safe walking in North America compared to Western Europe, where I used to live, or Japan, which I've visited a few times.
If you really feel unsafe about incredibly low risk possibilities, your only choice is to stay indoors permanently. Most people feel safe walking because the chance of something happening is so unlikely.
Pedestrian deaths may have climbed in recent years because of increased smartphone use or changing behaviors. I see many more jaywalkers for example, especially by homeless drug addicts in west coast cities, many of whom just blindly step into traffic.
There is no rigorous way to attribute your claimed increase in pedestrian deaths to cars.
There are cell phones everywhere, but pedestrian deaths have only increased in the USA, so it is not that.
Walking in my neighborhood is objectively more dangerous than it needs to be. In the past decade there have been several instances where motorists have mowed down and killed pedestrians, sometimes when they were minding their own business walking on the sidewalk.
I'm sick of motorists only valuing their own convenience and using demeaning language to describe the pedestrians that they victimize.
For their occupants, sure. For those outside cars (and remember, children can't drive) not so much: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/americas-cars-trucks-ar...