I’d expect the baseline denominator to be “number of times a pedestrian crosses a roadway”.
Drivers blast through red lights more frequently than you might expect. However, they almost all do it when there aren’t any pedestrians crossing or any other cars on their road, because the presence of stopped vehicles or crossing pedestrians in the road ahead is a much stronger visual prompt than a more abstract light that isn’t even in their path. The most dangerous case is where the road ahead of the car is currently completely clear, but someone is about to step into the road (or a car is about to enter the intersection from a side road).
Likewise pedestrians almost always notice cars not slowing down to stop, even when they have a walk signal and are about to cross. Cars in high speed motion are somewhat noisy even without combustion engine noise, even when the pedestrian can’t see the road.
So a pedestrian collision usually needs all five of: inattentive driver, a road with no obvious visible obstacles, a pedestrian that doesn’t notice the car either, entering the road on the same side, within a narrow time window around when the car passes through. Even then, most impacts are not fatal (~10% from the linked site).
A car coming out of a parking garage almost certainly won’t kill if it hits, because most impacts that kill pedestrians are at substantially greater speeds. Also almost all are “glancing” hits that throw the pedestrian aside due to the pedestrian only being partly in the path of the car at the time of impact.
I too have experienced a number of “near misses” without actual collision, and that’s exactly what I would expect given the statistics.
I’d expect the baseline denominator to be “number of times a pedestrian crosses a roadway”.
Drivers blast through red lights more frequently than you might expect. However, they almost all do it when there aren’t any pedestrians crossing or any other cars on their road, because the presence of stopped vehicles or crossing pedestrians in the road ahead is a much stronger visual prompt than a more abstract light that isn’t even in their path. The most dangerous case is where the road ahead of the car is currently completely clear, but someone is about to step into the road (or a car is about to enter the intersection from a side road).
Likewise pedestrians almost always notice cars not slowing down to stop, even when they have a walk signal and are about to cross. Cars in high speed motion are somewhat noisy even without combustion engine noise, even when the pedestrian can’t see the road.
So a pedestrian collision usually needs all five of: inattentive driver, a road with no obvious visible obstacles, a pedestrian that doesn’t notice the car either, entering the road on the same side, within a narrow time window around when the car passes through. Even then, most impacts are not fatal (~10% from the linked site).
A car coming out of a parking garage almost certainly won’t kill if it hits, because most impacts that kill pedestrians are at substantially greater speeds. Also almost all are “glancing” hits that throw the pedestrian aside due to the pedestrian only being partly in the path of the car at the time of impact.
I too have experienced a number of “near misses” without actual collision, and that’s exactly what I would expect given the statistics.