I don’t understand what you’re getting at. Pedestrian injuries and fatalities in the USA are up higher than they were since the 90s[0]. Just because it’s now safer to be a driver or occupant in a car doesn’t mean everyone is safer as a result.
Feel free to cite some sources and specify what you mean by a small fraction... The United states is large and I can point to several areas where pedestrian and cyclist injuries and fatalities are not a small fraction. They tend to be where people are allowed to walk and bike and not just areas where it's only legal or feasible to drive.
> The average crash kills more occupants than pedestrians
In the United States, that is by design. Besides a handful of primarily coastal cities, you cannot legally or feasibly bike or walk in many places.
> I don't think pedestrians are a reason to say teens shouldn't drive.
I can't find anywhere in this thread that anyone was making a claim that teens shouldn't be able to drive. I believe people were saying we shouldn't allow people who are, statistically speaking, the least capable of driving safely to drive just because they'll be safer if they crash. We shouldn't lower our already extremely low bar for driving standards just because cars are getting bigger and occupants are more likely to survive when they run into a person or a tree.
I'd be perfectly fine with a driving age of 16, as long as the license was limited to vehicles that were under a specific size/weight and our driving standards and tests were greatly improved... With states like Georgia moving ahead with allowing anyone to get a license only with parental approval[0], I have no faith in things getting any better.
> I can't find anywhere in this thread that anyone was making a claim that teens shouldn't be able to drive.
To be clear I meant "under 18" there when I said "teens", because that's the group for which the law differs by country. "teenage minors" is normally what that word means to me.
So specifically, the chain of conversation went like this:
"The issue is that 15 year olds are just that, 15 year old kids. "
"How come 16 year old kids can drive just fine in the US?"
I very much read that as talking about whether teens are a hazard and should be able to drive, deliberately making a comparison to 18+ rules in Sweden.
"They can't. [...] Sixteen- to 19-year-olds represent 3.9% of licensed drivers, but account for 8.6% of drivers in all crashes and 6.0% of drivers in fatal crashes."
That continues the same comparison. Then I argued that the total rate of fatalities has been dropping tremendously, so teens these days are less of a hazard than non-teens in decades past.
> I believe people were saying we shouldn't allow people who are, statistically speaking, the least capable of driving safely to drive just because they'll be safer if they crash.
Do you mean Aeolun's comment? It's definitely not what I meant and nobody replied to that comment. So I don't think that's what the conversation was about.
> We shouldn't lower our already extremely low bar for driving standards just because cars are getting bigger and occupants are more likely to survive when they run into a person or a tree.
I'm not sure which age bar you're talking about, but honestly it depends on what you're trying to optimize for. And it's not just occupants surviving more. People in other cars survive more, and if you look back at the same years pedestrians survive more too! In the last few years the pedestrian fraction of vehicle deaths has been 16-17% of 1.15 deaths per hundred million miles, and in the late 70s it was 16-17% of 3.3 deaths per hundred million miles. https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedes...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
The improvement is less if you go per capita instead of per 100 million miles, but it's still a big improvement.
And yes I'm aware that pedestrian deaths hit a low point and have been rising in the last few years, which is a real problem, but they're still significantly lower than they used to be.
[0] https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Ped%20Spotl...