Crossing the street sucks
So we made some fun little stickers to help.
Red Lights
According to this kind of old pamphlet from the Federal Highway Administration, you probably shouldn’t trust cars to stop. One third of drivers admitted to running a red light in the past 30 days. That doesn’t really give us an idea of how many red lights they ran versus how many they actually stopped at, and it also only includes people who were willing to admit this in a government-run survey.
I don’t think you should have to be hyper-aware of that fact every time you cross a busy street, but I also don’t think you should die, so here’s a reminder:
Emails
What’s maybe even more scary is that a lot of drivers probably don’t realize they’ve just run a red light. In a survey conducted by the car insurance company Nationwide back in March of 2025, one in ten respondents admitted to reading emails on their phone while driving.
Other random distractions, like playing with the AC controls, skipping to the next Sabrina Carpenter song, yelling at loud children in the back seat, or attempting to put a messy meatball sandwich back together are all probably real reasons that people didn’t realize they’ve run a red light. The email statistic was just the first one I found that fit on a sticker.
I picture some jerk driving an overbuilt Chevy Yukon, flying through an intersection while they refresh their email app for the 100th time, hoping for a shipping update on the latest plastic thing they were so excited to buy from Amazon, and thinking to themselves “Huh, why did I feel a speedbump in the middle of that intersection? Oh well.” And then they plow onward to their distant suburban home and an unhappy family that only stays together out of convenience.
Maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part, but drivers like that are the reason I have to make these:
Kids
How bad is it really, though? These behaviors seem problematic, but maybe it’s totally safe and I’m just overreacting.
According to the CDC’s Web-based Injury Statistics Query And Reporting System (WISQARS), more kids and teens are killed each year in motor vehicle injuries than by gun violence.
In fact, “Unintentional [Motor Vehicle] Traffic” is the number one leading cause of injury-related death for people between one and 17 years old in the entire country. So, yeah, I think it’s pretty bad.
I imagine at least some of those were kids crossing the street while some jerk in a Chevy Yukon was checking their email and ran a red light.
Anyway, good luck out there!
