From the New York Times, I'm Sabrina Tavernisie, and this is the Daily.

A puzzling new pattern has taken hold on American roads. Pedestrian traffic deaths,

which had been on the decline for years, have skyrocketed.

Today, my colleague... have skyrocketed.

Today, my colleague Emily Badger, on her investigation into why. It's Thursday, January 4th.

It's Thursday, January 4th. So Emily you spent months investigating a very surprising trend and that is

pedestrian deaths after decades of declines are now rising.

So we wanted to talk to you about that investigation and really look closely at this question of why.

But before we get there, tell me how you came to this story. Where'd you begin?

So I write about urban policy for the Times, which means I write about transportation, among other things, and sort of how people use it and how we get around and how important it is to our lives.

And this one very apparent pattern keeps coming up over and over again, which is that there has been this traffic safety

crisis in America affecting in particular pedestrians.

You know, for years and

years throughout the 80s the 90s the early 2000s roads in America were becoming safer and safer for pedestrians and

then something changes around 2009 all of a sudden roads start to become more dangerous year over year to the point where more

than 3,000 additional pedestrians died in 2021 compared to 2009.

And it's this incredible mystery for a number of reasons.

One of them is that we don't see anything like this in other industrialized countries.

You know, we don't see pedestrian deaths rising.

If anything, they're falling in other countries.

So in this mystery, you know, there's something particular to the United States going on.

There's something that starts around 2009 going on and figuring out exactly what that is is not incredibly

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