You have me confused for someone else. Lemmy is a big place with multiple users, someone else said that it’s both.
But sure, here you go:
Pedestrian fatalities are correlated with two major factors: speed and vehicle size. In North America, streets are designed to make driving easier and faster: lanes are made wider, and obstacles are removed to reduce visual clutter. This results in everything in NA looking flat and being spread out.
Vehicle sizes are goibg up because of the “size wars”: the EPA made limits on fuel emissions barring vehicle size, so auto manufacturers decided to make larger vehicles to get around the limitations. Consumers wanted bigger, “safer” vehicles to make it more likely to survive a crash, so there’s become an arms race for vehicle size. As these vehicles get bigger, pedestrians become harder to see, and if a pedestrian is hit, the grill is so high, the pedesteian will be thrown under the vehicle as opposed to over it.
As North America grows, we expand into suburbs, which are residential only, requiring residents to commute into the city to get groceries or go to work. More driving means more km driven.
And if you want my sources, here are a few to get you started: