Man people in 1980 just fucking hated pedestrians. No phones, light cars and they still mowed people down at a greater rate than the post smartphone peak.

These comments are all over the place. If you must look at correlations, there are some more rigorous methodologies to study cell phone use or vehicle weight you can use.

My preference is when you're given historical data is to find a natural experiment and use something like an interrupted time series regression. For example, if there are two cities with mostly similar characteristics but one criminalizes cell phone use more explicitly, you can compare statical differences in accidents while controlling for historical trends.

And that's just from the top of my head. That said, there's fairly concrete evidence without looking at correlations... at least, we know heavier cars are much more lethal from physical tests, no correlation needed. The historical trends also have conflicting factors too, like safety features; e.g. mandatory rear view camera in... 2017, I think it was? So yeah, things can also just be murky if you don't isolate your variables.

• National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): The historical pedestrian fatality statistics are sourced directly from the NHTSA's Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which tracks traffic fatalities nationwide. https://www.nhtsa.gov/book/countermeasures-that-work/pedestrian-safety
• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA): The historical vehicle weight data and the market shift toward light trucks and SUVs come from the EPA's annual Automotive Trends Report, which maintains data on every new light-duty vehicle produced since 1975. https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report
• Pew Research Center: The timeline of smartphone adoption and mobile internet use in the United States is tracked by the Pew Research Center's National Public Opinion Reference Surveys. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/01/08/internet-use-smartphone-ownership-digital-divides-in-u-s/
• Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS): The safety analysis regarding vehicle lethality, front-end geometry (the "leading edge"), and blind spots during pedestrian impacts relies on multiple IIHS studies, including their specific analyses of pedestrian crash lethality by vehicle type. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians

I don't think this is a useful comparison and I think it's a dishonest to present it this way.

You're trying to show that smartphones cause pedestrian deaths. This leaves out some very important info like figuring out if traffic accidents per mile driven have increased, if there are more pedestrians, the rates of death per accident and which kinds of vehicles are most associated with these deaths vs what people walk (or limp) away from.

From one of your sources, let's look at what that red line looks like in a different scale. You've stretched that way out. Looks like the overall trend for non pedestrian deaths is going down over the long run. So pedestrian deaths are increasing while non pedestrian deaths are decreasing. No wait, this graph shows a huge increase in non pedestrian deaths!

It's not like the phones we had before 2007 weren't "smart" though, they just generally weren't touchscreen. People were still just as distracted by them!