Construction Physics has done a deep dive on US pedestrian fatality numbers. I really appreciate data-based articles like this. I think the answer to the question in their headline, “Why are so many pedestrians killed by cars in the US?”, is that our street and road designs are about 50 years out of date compared to best practice elsewhere in the world, and auto-oil-highway industry propaganda hides this fact from us and encourages us to blame the victims. They don’t really talk much about this in the article. But the article focuses on a slightly different question, which is why have fatalities increased significantly over the last 15 years or so? They look at the evidence for the “SUV hypothesis”, increases in drinking and drug use among both drivers and pedestrians, and distracted driving due to cell phones. The evidence seems to support the SUV hypothesis best, and this makes sense to me.