A closer look at the pedestrian-wearing-headphones crash study

Those unpredictable headphone wearing pedestrians!  They're just asking to get hit.  And now a study from the University of Maryland proves it.

Brad Aaron from Streetsblog tears the headline-making study apart.  While reports latched onto the "pedestrian fatalities increased three-fold over the last seven years due to increased headphone use" snippet, they failed to include some other crucial information that was included in the report.

From the study: "...neither causation nor correlation can be established between headphone use and pedestrian risk."  How far are they willing to take the conclusions from their study?  "However, we believe our grading system shows strong circumstantial evidence that headphones may have played a role in most injuries and deaths in the case series."  Not super strong.

A few large holes in the study (both from Aaron's excellent post as well as from the study itself):

• The researchers looked at 116 cases between 2004 and 2011, while total pedestrian deaths during the same time frame numbered in the tens of thousands.

• They mostly used media reports to glean information from the crashes-- not the best source of information for a comprehensive picture of pedestrian fatalities.  This limitation is something that researchers acknowledge and discuss throughout the in the study.

• The majority of victims in the study were not struck by cars, but by trains (55%).  First off, car-pedestrian crashes are completely different from train-pedestrian crashes.  Aaron writes that this high train-pedestrian crash rate in the whole study could just "as much as anything could call into question the perils of walking on train tracks — or the need for safer pedestrian thoroughfares."  Or, as the study says, more media attention paid to these kinds of instances.

• Secondly, from the study itself-- there are 4,000 to 5,000 pedestrian crashes per year, and about 50 train-pedestrian crashes per year.  The proportion of crashes studied by the researchers doesn't reflect this reality in the least.

• The study does not account for other factors like driver error, pedestrian intoxication, suicidal intentions, etc.

• Nor could it account for the number of incidents where pedestrians were wearing headphones and did not get hit by a car, or near-misses, or the like (that doesn't make the news), so it's impossible to draw solid conclusions about pedestrian inattentiveness due to headphones.

I highly highly highly recommend reading the study.  It's only four pages long and is a much more balanced and unclear picture than reported snippets would have you believe .  There are a lot of limitations to the study and a great deal of researcher speculation.

Being attentive and alert while walking, biking, and driving is important.  There are a whole host of things to draw our attention away from concentrating on the road, and that can be dangerous.  I find it really annoying when people have headphones in to the point of inattentiveness when they really need to be paying attention.  (My personal pet peeve-- people in the grocery store with headphones who can't hear me when I say "excuse me" to get that can of tomatoes or whatever they're blocking.  People with headphones in while interacting at a counter-- grocery, takeout, bank, or otherwise.  Come on!)

Seatbelts, airbags, shocks, climate control, and quiet rides help detach drivers from the reality that driving is the most dangerous thing we do (both to ourselves and others) on a consistent, daily basis.  While people in a car have the protection that the car affords us, pedestrians have little or nothing, and they are dependent on those of us who are steering thousands of pounds of metal at high speeds to do so responsibly--especially in an area like ours where major throughfares are lacking sidewalks and other pedestrian infrastructure.  Not everyone is a driver, but everyone is a pedestrian -- even if it's just walking from your car to the door of your destination.