Trump administration: not enough pedestrians are being killed

Pedestrian deaths are rising in the U.S. even as they are generally decreasing elsewhere:

Booker’s death in September 2022 fit an escalating pattern on America’s roads. Between 2010 and 2023, yearly deaths caused by cars and trucks striking pedestrians rose 70 percent, an examination of federal data and other public records by The Washington Post shows.

City by city across the United States, the surge — from 4,302 in 2010 to 7,314 deaths in 2023 — largely occurred on roads with a few things in common. They were concentrated on multilaneroads, with the largest clusters of deaths occurring on thoroughfares that cut through economically distressed neighborhoods and had fading commercial strips, according to the Post investigation.

Wide roads and fast-moving vehicles — especially when combined with signs of poverty, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and a lack of pedestrian-focused roadway improvements — produced a pattern of death-by-vehicle that is uniquely American, according to the investigation, which draws on crash data, census records and thousands of pages of police reports, as well as interviews with current and former officials, engineering experts and victims’ families.

More people in these areas lack cars and are forced to walk, while many of those killed tended to be impaired and were taking risks trying to cross, the review found.

The country has become a global outlier, as fatality rates in such incidents have declined almost 30 percent in other developed countries in the decade ending in 2023.

The Trump administration, however, thinks that these numbers can get higher and they’re determined to make it happen:

While the Biden administration provided modest financial backing to improve pedestrian safety, the Transportation Department under President Donald Trump is trying to claw back some of that money from several cities. A federal official told Boston’s transportation agency in September that the administrationwas pulling funds for a project it deemed “hostile to motor vehicles,” according to correspondence obtained by The Post.

In a statement, the Transportation Department saidthe withdrawal of grants was part of a shift away from what it called the Biden administration’s “costly social and climate initiatives that de-prioritized the needs of American drivers and increased congestion risks.”

“Human life ain’t worth shit” is one of the core operating principles of Trump 2.0.