Plenty of blue collar workers didn’t get the “luxury” of staying home. I think the only time I was staying home was for a few weeks as a temporary layoff cause there wasn’t enough work to do, not because of any kind of safeguarding.

Empty roads = no traffic = idiot drivers driving extra fast and careless

Yes, they did. I had to be on the roads a bit at the height of the pandemic due to my job. Far fewer people were driving, but basically all of them were driving like absolute raving lunatics. People were acting under the assumption that cops wouldn’t be out (which was probably true, on average) so therefore laws just didn’t exist anymore.

I also notice that a highly visible subset of drivers have continued to behave this way even after the return to “normal.” They’re usually identifiable by the ownership of a Nissan Altima with haphazardly applied window tint, often spotted squeezing up the shoulder to run a red light into traffic without bothering to look first.

So the context is that roads in the U.S are generally designed for speeds way higher than what the speed limit is, and what the average speed with regular traffic volumes is. The pandemic removed a lot of this traffic, which was the primary impediment to drivers driving the design speed of the roads. This higher speed then led to the increased pedestrian fatalities.

I worked through COVID and drove a lot - I was a custom integrator (yeah…that was deemed “essential”) stopping at 1-4 homes per day. I’m less surprised by there being enough vehicles to kill with than there being enough pedestrians to hit. Seeing more than one or two people on the way to a client’s house was rare

Driving downtown from the office took 12 minutes. For context, it was usually a 45-60 minute ride. Barely anyone was on the road and I never had issues parking

That does seem very suspect. Maybe it’s adjusted for miles driven? Even though less driving happened, per mile driven the rate still increased.