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Comment by bobthepanda | Hacker News Reader

500 additional people is a lot of people, considering that as recently as 2009 the annual death total was 4109 people. https://cdn.statcdn.com/Infographic/images/normal/17194.jpeg

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That’s for the full year this is comparing six months worth of data, and 2009 was well outside the norms.

I don’t mean to downplay deaths but looking at a few datapoints may not represent a trend. Economics, weather, etc vary from year to year.

That chart shows a decline trend from 1990-2009, and then an increase every single year after that.

It’s been 13 years, at which point do we call it a trend? Especially if you compare to peer nations which have not seen the upward trend: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...

That basic question is why people started using statistics to analyze data. Your article is talking overall deaths not pedestrians, which is a useful point of comparison but doesn’t address pedestrian fatalities. It’s easy to say something is a trend, much harder to say if there is some specific case or if it’s random variation. Do something like compare rates of smartphone adoption vs pedestrian deaths between countries and look for correlations and you don’t want to go with gut feel.

Also, look at that chart again, 2 years after 2009 were lower than the year before. I only bring it up because of how easy it is to see trends that aren’t there.

2009 is not long after smartphones started becoming a thing. I wonder if there's a correlation there: more distracted driving, more distracted walking.

I think the correlation would be stronger with the size of personal vehicles getting larger tbh. Larger vehicles are far less safe for pedestrians.

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