@dualityk@mastodon.sdf.org @scott that's fair, for sure.
But on the other hand, the reversal seems very sudden. I don't think the data would look like that given fleet-turnover rates, but that's just my intuition
@TechConnectify @dualityk @scott from https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-trends-report
Doesn't address the fleet-turnover at all, but suggest the changes in weight are less than I'd have expected from 2004 to 2020 (with a notable increase from 2020+). The average age of a car on the road is 12.5 years? (R&T) so you'd expect the combined fleet to look approximately like a moving average of this.
(This image should be a picture of the combined new car fleet)
@TechConnectify @dualityk@sdf.org @scott Similar to you, I struggle to find pedestrian collision rates that aren't the fatality rates. IIHS has pedestrian fatality rates: https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/pedestrians
low in 2009, and then increasing since. That doesn't seem to match up cleanly with a hypothetical smoothed out weight or footprint from the fleet from above.
Edit: actually? Kinda might match up with the footprint data..
Edit2: What I can find about fatality rate suggests it's around 7.2%ish constantish
@TechConnectify @scott In the same timeframe, mobile phone penetration appears to have gone from 30% to 90%?
I admit, I don't see an obvious match in curve shape here. Looks more like footprint to me than cellphone adoption.
@TechConnectify @scott But all these correlations appear to be insufficiently clean for me to trust, and I'd want someone who actually did this for a living to chime in.
@TechConnectify @scott (The argument against footprint: while the source doesn't have the data, we can be pretty confident that footprint increased during the switch from sedans to SUVs, and yet pedestrian deaths were declining in that time frame.)