Things used to be simpler. Prior to the advent of cell phones, the average American man would just wake up, get into his car, hit a few kids while driving to work, put in about 20 minutes of actual effort at the office, then swing back home to drink a bottle of scotch — of course, running over a few toddlers in the process to free up some future parking spaces.


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While this may sound like an exaggeration, a chart that’s recently been floating around Twitter shows that many drivers of yore really did seem to treat driving as a game of pre-teen Whac-a-Mole.



According to this graphic (and this updated one) created by Jeremy Horpedahl, around 17,000 child pedestrians were killed by cars between 1968 and 1978. In contrast, there were around 2,000 child pedestrian deaths between 2010 and 2020.


Now, no one can be sure why people used to kill so many kids behind the wheel (alcohol). Maybe driver’s ed was just worse (the drivers were drunk), or maybe kids just got tougher (drunk driving was largely legal until 1985). Who’s to say? (Me — it was booze).



The actual creator of the graphics isn’t sure, either. In a post for his site, Horpedahl speculates about the reason for this precipitous decline, ranging from kids being out on the streets less thanks to Stranger Danger fears, to better medical care, to various other changes that could have led to less children experiencing death by Cadillac.



The “kids don’t play like they used to” explanation may actually play a pretty sizable part in this whole story. After all, deaths of adult pedestrians recently hit a 40-year-high, and with the ubiquity of pedestrian-killing SUVs and cars that are so big that they need cameras just to see in front of them, pedestrians aren’t exactly out of drivers’ firing lines.


Of course, most of these problems could be solved with better safety features and increased public transit so those who don’t want to drive don’t have to. But as a start, let’s just try to make drivers a little more careful behind the wheel — because no one wants to spend their Saturday scraping little Jimmy off the front bumper.