2026-04-27 19:15:00
如果你未能成功购买或因价格过高而放弃2028年洛杉矶奥运会门票，你并不孤单。购买这些门票的过程就像与一位极其富有的朋友交谈，他们谈论自己热爱的运动，比如击剑、板球和羽毛球，同时也在考验你的财务责任感。作者在尝试购票时经历了诸多困扰，包括复杂的网站、不透明的库存、高价门票（最高可达5000美元）以及令人失望的购票体验。尽管组织方承诺奥运会将对本地居民经济友好，例如提供28美元的门票，但实际中许多门票价格远超预期，甚至有近50%的门票价格低于200美元，而只有5%的价格超过1000美元。
购票流程中，门票分为A至J的字母等级，但不同赛事和场馆的定价标准不一，导致同一等级的门票价格差异巨大。例如，游泳赛事的A级门票可能比羽毛球的A级门票贵数千美元。此外，部分赛事可能不提供所有等级的门票，这使得购票更加复杂。作者在早期购票窗口中发现，即使拥有优先权，也无法获得热门赛事的门票，且价格高昂，甚至愿意为一场初步比赛支付1116美元。最终，作者决定放弃购买，尽管在闭幕式门票上仍感到震惊，因为最贵的门票价格高达4961美元。
文章指出，奥运会通常超支，且对主办城市居民来说，门票价格过高可能成为负担。尽管洛杉矶2028组委会（LA28）声称将提供更多本地优惠门票，但其财务透明度和定价策略仍受到质疑。未来可能引入动态定价机制，进一步推高热门赛事的票价。此外，从明年起，门票将在Ticketmaster、Sports Illustrated Tickets和AXS/Eventim等平台上进行转售，而美国的转售市场通常价格高昂。作者虽对未来的购票机会抱有一丝希望，但仍可能需要依赖朋友或寻找更便宜的途径才能观看比赛。
Buying tickets to the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics is kind of like having a megawealthy friend talk to you about the hobbies that they enjoy.
Do you fence? Do you like cricket? Badminton’s fun, right?
Like a diabolically rich friend, the Olympics are also, at the same time, a test of financial responsibility.
How much would you pay to watch people gracefully sword fight? Do you think you could learn to love cricket if you were spending $100? Would you like to go into mild credit card debt to see a less beautiful version of tennis?
Ultimately, I said no to my rich friend, the Olympics. I wasn’t alone.
As so many potential LA 2028 spectators have expressed, the entire ticket-buying process — email registration, a finicky website, specific time slots, opaque inventory — was bad. The fact that prices were exorbitant, as much as $5,000, after so many assurances from organizers and elected officials that these Games would be financially accessible, including $28 tickets available to locals, with nearly 50 percent of all tickets costing less than $200, and only 5 percent of tickets costing more than $1,000.
I experienced the frustration of the terrible website, a bad time slot, and the sticker shock firsthand. I eventually logged off, empty-handed, during a spiral in which I found myself seriously considering spending money to see javelin, a sport I have never once thought about.
Here’s how the great 2028 Olympic ticket mess went down.
The road to disappointment began this winter.
On January 14, 2026, organizers opened registration for the first ticket drop, scheduled for April. Interested Olympic spectators were invited to submit their email addresses anytime until March 18, and residents of Los Angeles and Oklahoma City (softball and canoe slalom will take place there) had the opportunity to register for a locals-only presale. You were then entered into a random draw for a chance to purchase tickets, and those lucky enough to be selected were given a specific time slot between April 9 and April 19 to purchase tickets. Entrants living in LA and OKC who were selected were assigned a slot in a window that began a week earlier, on April 2.
The tickets are categorized using an alphabetical tier system in which Tier A accounts for the most expensive tickets, Tier B is the second-most expensive, with prices decreasing all the way down to Tier J. It quickly gets confusing, though, because there’s no standard tier pricing across events — so the Tier A tickets for swimming will cost more (possibly thousands more) than the Tier A tickets for badminton.
Here’s the other wrinkle: Not every event will have all the lettered tiers. In other words, some venues may only go down to D, while a bigger stadium or arena may go all the way to J. But since there’s no standard pricing, an E-tier ticket in a bigger venue could theoretically end up being more pricey than a C-tier — depending on the event.
This is all difficult to visualize, especially since consumers can’t see the inventory of tickets available or the prices until they’re logged into the buying portal during their time slot. When you do have access, it’s presented as a giant list that you have to scroll through. And while you can see what the cheapest tickets are for the event you want to go to, you still have to click through to see the tiers. (As a workaround, the very helpful people on Olympics Reddit created a crowd-sourced spreadsheet detailing all the available sporting sessions, the tiers available for each, and the respective prices.)
People living in LA — with the earliest time slots — didn’t seem to fare as well as organizers promised. On TikTok and in interviews with traditional media outlets, Angelenos said that they didn’t find the affordable tickets that were promised, and even though they had the early bird advantage, some found that some of the premier events, like gymnastics and swimming, weren’t available. If they were in stock, only the most expensive tiers were up for purchase.
Meanwhile, organizers confirmed that no new inventory was added after the presale and before the first general sale began on April 9. A friend of mine who got an April 10 slot concurred that the options were slim and was tempted by a $1,116.27 entry to a preliminary swimming heat:
I ended up receiving what seemed to be one of the last spots, an April 17 window. And after everything I’d seen so far, my hopes were not high. If people were having trouble during the presale, getting into the fray two days before the entire drop closed was not looking promising.
Right when my buying window unlocked, swimming and gymnastics were already sold out, as previous buyers also reported was the case. The same was true for men’s and women’s basketball. Tennis was blocked out as well. Football (soccer) was an option, but the only tickets I had access to buy were in Nashville. Nothing against Nashville, but I was looking to go to the LA Olympics in Los Angeles.
The best team sporting event I had access to was Women’s Volleyball. The US team is the reigning silver medalists and won gold in 2020. It would be fun to see the American women mount their medal defense.
I was very close to purchasing these, but ultimately decided against it.
The problem is that the only tickets available to me started at $489.92 for tier A, the highest one for the event, and they were for a preliminary round match — the round-robin games before eliminations begin. There’s no guarantee, not even for that price, that I would be able to see the US team play; you’re spending nearly $500 for one match on a specific day, between two teams that have yet to be determined. However, if there were a cheaper option available for this, I would have jumped at it.
There were some tickets available for track and field, but none for relays and sprints. Javelin, which was bundled with the men’s 3,000-meter steeplechase final, went for $750.38.
The most affordable option I came across was tickets to see a preliminary round of women’s cricket for $105. While this would no doubt be a lucky day for a cricket enthusiast, I didn’t bite. While the price was right, I couldn’t be sure that my excitement for cricket in two years would be high enough to justify it.
Finally, in an act of mild humiliation, I decided to click on tickets for the closing ceremonies. They were sold out, but I wanted to see just how expensive they had been. The most you could spend on the finale celebration was a cool $4,961.20. That’s nearly $5K not to see any sports.
The thing to keep in mind about the LA Olympics is that hosting the Games is, more often than not, a huge, expensive burden that strains security resources and stresses infrastructure. But because it’s the Olympics, many cities bid to host them anyway.
Historically, the Olympics have a tendency to run over budget. The most recent Winter Games in Milan cost hundreds of millions of dollars more than expected, and according to France’s court of auditors, French taxpayers ended up shouldering a 6 billion euro burden after hosting the 2024 Summer Olympics (though organizers dispute this number). The French government initially said the public funding would only be 1 billion euros, and measures like using existing structures for the events (i.e., not spending money creating new permanent venues) would mitigate cost.
“These events rarely end up being a great deal for the people who live in the cities where they’re staged,” said Brett House, a professor specializing in macroeconomics and international finance at Columbia Business School. House explained that the Olympics and similar events like the World Cup tend to have cost overruns and that organizations like the IOC and FIFA often put their priorities ahead of local needs (e.g., FIFA’s dispute with New Jersey and NJ Transit). Spending money on city infrastructure to accommodate the rush of people coming to the Olympics or any massive international event is a different animal than spending money on city infrastructure to actually improve the city long-term, and problems arise when the two don’t align.
The big question now is whether the LA Olympics will also go over budget and who will end up paying.
LA28, a privately funded nonprofit, is in charge of organizing these Games. Ticketing programs are one of LA28’s major revenue streams (along with licensing, corporate sponsors, and significant contributions from the International Olympic Committee), and according to LA28, the entire event will cost upwards of $7.1 billion. Selling pricey tickets helps pay for that budget.
But the city of Los Angeles, the state of California, and LA28 are still finalizing a safety net deal in which the city would step in and pay for the first $270 million in losses if there is a deficit. If the losses mount, the state would then step in and cover $270 million more. (According to LAist, lawmakers passed the legislation to enable this in 2017, but Gov. Gavin Newsom has yet to sign it.) LAist reports that “city officials say if that contract isn’t airtight, it could leave L.A. with millions in unexpected costs.”
Despite press releases and assurances from organizing committees like LA28 about the positive economic impact — jobs, contracts, tourism, etc. — history, and more recently Paris, suggests that LA taxpayers may end up footing some of the bill. Shutting those same taxpayers out of the events that they might end up paying for is a boorish look, and perhaps explains why organizers and city officials like LA Mayor Karen Bass have continually emphasized the importance of accessibility for LA residents.
“It is very hard to quantify the benefits that organizers claim will accrue to cities,” House added. “Of course, we can put numbers on some of the elements, but the numbers almost never come out as high as the organizers and the international organizations behind them promise that they will be.”
For unlucky fans who struck out on this first drop of tickets, there are some options: entrants who did not purchase tickets or were not selected will automatically be entered for a chance to buy tickets during future drops. The Olympics organizing committee said that the next drop will include “refreshed inventory” for the premier events that sold quickly during this one, but it is unclear what specific ticket inventory will be included in each future drop. The next drop will, according to LA28, occur in August.
Consumers (myself included) are probably hoping that the second drop will have some more affordable tickets available. In a City Council meeting on April 14, members grilled LA28 CEO Reynold Hoover over ticket prices, the 24 percent service fee that applied to all purchases, and financial transparency. Hoover and LA28 have promised that there will be more tickets — including more $28 tickets — available for locals in the future. But he also told LAist earlier this month that he wouldn’t be opposed to implementing dynamic pricing.
Dynamic pricing is based on demand and timing — more interest means a more expensive ticket — and embracing it could mean prices for premier events get even higher. As an enjoyer of popular concerts and someone who uses Uber and Lyft, I don’t believe this approach has ever worked in my favor.
That’s not all.
Beginning next year, verified tickets will be available on three resale platforms: Ticketmaster, Sports Illustrated Tickets, and AXS/Eventim. The resale and secondary ticket market in the US can be very pricey, with tickets for popular events often going for a tremendous markup. As my colleague recently pointed out, reselling has become its own lucrative marketplace. While the 2026 Milan Cortina Games constrained the resale prices of tickets in its official app to face value (plus service fees), it’s unclear if that will be the case in LA.
If astronomical resale prices and dynamic pricing do go into effect, the Olympics will feel a lot like concerts and other sporting events in the US: extremely expensive, attended largely by people who can afford to spend $1,000 for a night out in the nosebleeds.
But at the same time, I’m still registered for the next ticket drop (and future ones). I’m holding out the slightest hope that organizers might open up more inventory, and perhaps I’ll be lucky enough to see the next Simone Biles or Suni Lee in person, or watch Anthony Edwards and A’ja Wilson lead the US basketball teams to gold. More expensive resale is an option down the line, but if that doesn’t happen, I’ll have two years to befriend a diabolically rich person to take me along with them.
2026-04-27 19:00:00
新泽西州州长米基·谢里尔（Mikie Sherrill）于2026年3月10日在新泽西州议会大厦的议会议厅发表讲话。| Heather Khalifa/Bloomberg via Getty Images
多年来，许多民主党人批评一些在高利润企业工作的员工（如亚马逊、沃尔玛和麦当劳）使用医疗补助（Medicaid）福利，认为这些企业应为员工提供更合理的工资和医疗保障。然而，这一观点存在根本性错误，并与左翼对社会福利的普遍愿景相悖。实际上，民主党正试图将这种模糊的“企业福利”概念转化为实际的税收政策。例如，新泽西州和科罗拉多州的立法者正推动对雇佣医疗补助受益人的公司征收罚款，以弥补该计划的资金缺口。随着共和党削减医疗补助资金，其他州也可能效仿，但这将是一个错误。
医疗补助并非“企业福利”
首先，医疗补助作为“企业福利”的说法缺乏依据。2014年《平价医疗法案》（Affordable Care Act）为各州提供新的医疗补助资金，使研究人员得以观察该计划对经济的影响。结果显示，增加医疗补助并未导致企业降低工资。此外，从理论上看，公共医疗保障反而应增强工人在劳动力市场中的议价能力，而非削弱。如果政府能保障失业者的基本需求，他们将更有能力要求更高的工资。因此，医疗补助和食品券等计划实际上是补贴工人，而非企业。
其次，这种观点实际上支持了将医疗保障与就业挂钩的模式，这与进步派主张的全民医疗保障理念相冲突。例如，伯尼·桑德斯（Bernie Sanders）认为，沃尔玛雇佣医疗补助受益人相当于“从纳税人身上吸血”，但这种逻辑却与他倡导的“全民医保”（Medicare-for-All）政策相矛盾，后者旨在取代企业提供的医疗保障，由政府统一覆盖。
对雇佣医疗补助受益人的公司征税是错误的
尽管这些批评存在概念性缺陷，但它们正逐渐影响政策制定。新泽西州州长谢里尔提议，对雇佣医疗补助受益人的大型企业每年每人征收725美元罚款。科罗拉多州的部分民主党人也支持类似政策，认为不应让州民为大型企业支付医疗补助费用。然而，这种做法可能带来负面影响：一方面，企业可能歧视那些可能使用医疗补助的员工（如单亲母亲），以减少成本；另一方面，低收入工人可能因担心被解雇而放弃申请医疗补助，即使其雇主提供的保险更差。正如新泽西政策研究中心的彼得·陈（Peter Chen）所言，这会削弱医疗补助的吸引力，而该计划通常比企业保险更全面且可转移。
直接提高最低工资或更有效
民主党人抱怨亚马逊员工使用医疗补助，确实反映了现实问题：美国工人应获得更多经济收益，许多州也需填补医疗补助预算缺口。然而，医疗补助为工人提供跨岗位的全面保障，是积极因素，而非需要解决的问题。若想提高沃尔玛工人的工资，直接上调最低工资即可；若认为富人应多为社会福利做贡献，可提高个人和企业的最高税率。对雇佣医疗补助受益人的公司征税不仅无法直接提升工资，还可能引发歧视，削弱对公共医疗保障的争取，且税收收入远低于普遍增税。因此，最佳方式是直接采取行动，而非通过伤害工人的政策或激化纳税人对安全网计划的不满。
For years, many Democrats have lamented the fact that some workers at highly profitable corporations — from Amazon to Walmart to McDonald’s — receive Medicaid benefits.
Their reasoning isn’t hard to understand: To be eligible for safety net programs, one must have a low household income. And why should anyone working at a highly profitable enterprise earn a low income? Surely, Walmart can afford to provide its cashiers with a living wage and health care benefits. By not doing so, the Walton family is “living off corporate welfare from the federal government,” as Sen. Bernie Sanders put it in 2020.
This argument is intuitive. But it is also incorrect — and utterly antithetical to the left’s broader vision for social welfare.
Unfortunately, Democrats are on the cusp of turning their party’s incoherent conception of “corporate welfare” into actual tax policy. In New Jersey and Colorado, lawmakers are currently pushing to impose a fine on companies for every Medicaid recipient they keep on their payrolls, in order to shore up funding for that program. As Republican Medicaid cuts weigh on state budgets, others could be tempted to follow their lead.
That would be a mistake. These proposals are likely to harm low-income workers, while reinforcing the very employer-provided health insurance model that progressives rightly oppose.
At a high level, there are two problems with the populist critique of Medicaid as “corporate welfare.”
For one, there is no real basis for the notion that the program subsidizes large companies by allowing them to pay their workers lower wages.
In fact, America just ran a vast, real-world experiment that falsified that hypothesis. In 2014, the Affordable Care Act offered states new Medicaid funding to enroll millions of workers who were previously ineligible. This gave researchers an opportunity to gauge Medicaid’s economic impacts by looking at how conditions changed when various states expanded the program. And none of the resulting case studies found that increasing Medicaid benefits led employers to cut wages.
Further, there is no good reason to expect that public health insurance would reduce wages, even in theory. To the contrary, conventional welfare economics would actually suggest the opposite.
When workers are guaranteed health insurance and nutritional aid by the government, they enjoy more leverage over employers in the labor market, not less. If being unemployed means going hungry — or forgoing medical care — then many workers will accept the first job offer they get, no matter how poorly compensated.
By contrast, if the state provides jobless workers with some of their basic needs, then more will be able to hold out for higher wages.
All of which is to say, programs like Medicaid and food stamps subsidize workers, not their employers. Suggesting otherwise is both inaccurate and politically hazardous: If you tell people that Medicaid functions as a subsidy to Walmart, they’re liable to think that cutting the program isn’t such a bad idea.
Second, the populist argument validates the notion that workers should get health insurance from their employers, rather than the government — a concept that’s contrary to progressives’ own vision for universal health care.
In Sanders’s framing, when Walmart employs a Medicaid recipient, it is effectively leeching off taxpayers. This implies that a more upstanding company would assume responsibility for its employees’ health insurance, thereby relieving taxpayers of that burden.
And yet, in other contexts, progressives rightly argue that we should break the link between health care and employment.
Sanders is the nation’s most famous proponent of Medicare-for-All — a policy that would replace all employer-provided health insurance with government coverage. This would be a tall order politically. But the substantive case for shifting our system in this direction is unimpeachable: The employer-based health care model is both inefficient (since it generates higher administrative costs than a more centralized system) and inegalitarian (since it leaves Americans’ access to health care contingent on their labor market success).
Decrying Walmart workers’ use of Medicaid as evidence of scandalous “corporate welfare” — rather than a model of what the entire health insurance system should look like — is contrary to reformers’ own objectives.
Alas, despite its conceptual flaws, populist complaints about workers at big companies using Medicaid are getting more influential. What was once just a rhetorical cudgel against low-paying employers is now on the brink of generating actual policies.
In New Jersey, Democratic Gov. Mikie Sherrill has proposed a fine on all large employers with Medicaid recipients on their payrolls. Under her plan, such firms would have to pay the state $725 annually for each Medicaid enrollee they employ.
Meanwhile, some Democrats in Colorado’s state legislature are pushing a similar proposal, on the grounds that “Colorado taxpayers should not subsidize the nation’s largest corporations by way of our state providing Medicaid for their employees.”
These plans are responding to a genuine policy challenge: Thanks to President Donald Trump’s cuts to federal Medicaid funding, many states need to find new revenues to maintain benefits.
But fining companies that employ Medicaid recipients is not a sound solution. Indeed, such a policy would likely hurt the very workers it purports to help, for at least two reasons.
First, Sherill’s proposal incentivizes employers to discriminate against workers who seem likely to use Medicaid benefits.
Eligibility for Medicaid isn’t determined by a worker’s personal income, but by their household income and family size. For this reason, single mothers are especially likely to qualify for the program. Thus, under Sherrill’s plan, employers looking to fill low-wage positions could save money by disfavoring applicants who appear to have children and/or lack a partner. Likewise, companies that already employ Medicaid recipients would have a greater incentive to fire such workers.
Second, and relatedly, the proposal could deter low-wage workers from enrolling in Medicaid, even when their employers’ health plan offers worse benefits, for fear of making themselves a target for layoffs.
“This could discourage workers from enrolling in Medicaid because doing so would make them less employable,” Peter Chen, a senior policy analyst at the think-tank New Jersey Policy Perspectives, told me. “And yet, Medicaid is often a preferable insurance product for them because it’s portable and often provides better coverage for children than employer-based plans.”
When Democrats grouse about Amazon employees using Medicaid, they gesture at real problems. American workers deserve a larger cut of our economy’s proceeds. And many states need to plug holes in their Medicaid budgets.
But the fact that lots of workers have access to public health insurance — which follows them from job to job and offers comprehensive benefits — is a good thing, not a problem to be solved.
If you want to get Walmart workers a raise, you can hike the minimum wage. If you think the wealthy should contribute more to sustaining social programs, you can raise top tax rates on all individuals and corporations.
But fining companies that hire Medicaid users does not directly raise anyone’s pay. And such measures generate much less revenue than broad-based tax hikes, even as they encourage discrimination and undermine the broader fight for public health insurance.
In other words, the best way to hike the working poor’s wages — or the rich’s taxes — is to simply do those things. There’s no need to hurt workers with bad policy or stoke taxpayers’ resentment of safety net programs in the process.
2026-04-27 18:30:00
美国城市步行安全状况堪忧，其步行死亡率远高于加拿大、英国、澳大利亚和挪威等国家。尽管2025年上半年美国行人死亡人数较前一年减少了约11%（共3024人），但这一下降只是短暂的，因为疫情前的几年中，行人死亡率曾因道路空旷、车速加快而迅速上升。2019年行人死亡人数达到6272人，是近30年来最高水平，而这一数字可能因未计入停车场和车道等非主干道区域的死亡案例而被低估。
美国行人死亡率的上升与SUV和皮卡的流行密切相关，这些车辆因体积大、高度高，增加了对行人的伤害风险。此外，贫困人群向郊区迁移也导致更多人不得不在缺乏安全设施的道路上步行。尽管美国部分城市已引入“零愿景”（Vision Zero）计划，旨在通过道路设计减少交通事故，但因公众对改变现有交通模式的抵触，实施效果有限。交通监控摄像头等技术手段在其他国家有效，但在美国文化中却备受争议。
未来，美国若想改善步行安全，不仅需要技术革新（如自动紧急制动系统和自动驾驶汽车），更需从哲学层面重新审视交通规划，将行人安全置于优先位置。加拿大和澳大利亚等国虽有类似美国的汽车依赖型城市结构，但行人死亡率却显著更低，这表明改变并非遥不可及。只有将步行视为城市生活的重要组成部分，而非次要选择，美国才能真正实现更安全、更宜居的交通环境。
There are many ways you could measure the health of a city — its air quality index, its population growth, the number of jobs it added last year. My favorite is one not often high on the priority lists of city governments in the US: How safe is it to walk?
The US has the grievous distinction among peer countries as being one of the most dangerous places in the developed world for walking down the street. American pedestrians are killed by cars at three times the rate of Canadians, four times the rate of Brits and Australians, and more than 13 times the rate of Norwegians.
Last month, we finally got a bit of good news about pedestrian safety in America: About 11 percent fewer pedestrians were killed in the first half of 2025 — an estimated 3,024 people total — compared to the same period the previous year, according to a preliminary report published by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). That striking drop tracks a broader decline in total US car crash deaths last year.
Any number of lives saved is worth celebrating, of course, but this is a case where a positive data point occludes a grimmer story. Road fatalities are likely only falling so steeply because just a few years ago, the US saw a rapid, pandemic-era rise in the number of people killed by cars. In 2021, 7,470 pedestrians were killed in crashes, up from 6,565 in 2020 and 6,272 in 2019. We’re now climbing down from that unusually deadly period, but pedestrian deaths in the first half of 2025, GHSA reports, are still higher than they were in similar periods pre-Covid.
The ubiquitous killing of pedestrians on American streets preoccupies me like almost nothing else, but “pedestrian” strikes me as a uniquely terrible term (unless I’m using it to insult someone). Adam Snider, director of communications for GHSA, who talks about pedestrian deaths among other road safety issues for a living, hates the word, too. “We are all pedestrians,” he recently wrote. “The moment you step out of your car, off the bus, or out your front door — you’re one too” (inclusive, of course, of people who get around in wheelchairs, children in strollers, and others). Our ability and need to walk is one of our deepest human inheritances, Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. It is, she wrote, “the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart.” And getting killed in that most vulnerable, most human state is “visceral, it’s sudden, it’s violent,” Snider told me. “It’s an awful way to die.”
For all those reasons, although all car crash deaths are preventable tragedies, the US transportation system’s endangerment of pedestrians strikes me as uniquely obscene. Pedestrian fatalities may not be at the top of the list of causes of death in the US, but they punch above their weight in significance because they are an indicator of deeper problems in American quality of life that set us apart from peer countries that are far less wealthy.
Our weird hostility to walking is an assault on human dignity. Americans would all be better off if our built environment made it safe, convenient, and dignified to walk as a major mode of transportation in both cities and suburbs. We would be healthier, our air and climate would be less polluted, and our cities would be more pleasant, socially connected places to live. And making the changes required to kill fewer pedestrians would make car occupants safer, too, and help put a real dent in America’s ridiculously high rate of death by cars.
Over the long haul, the US, like other rich countries, has made a lot of progress on traffic safety, thanks to safer car engineering, the widespread adoption of seatbelts, and people simply driving around drunk less often. US traffic fatalities generally trended significantly downward over the last half-century, up until the pandemic. Which isn’t to say that our record is particularly good now — even at today’s fatality rates, at one of the safest times it’s ever been to ride in a car, Americans face a 1 percent lifetime risk of dying in a car crash.
And even as drivers and other people inside cars themselves have become safer, pedestrian safety began to diverge sharply from that of car occupants in the 2010s. In 2009, federal statistics recorded 4,109 pedestrians were killed by cars; by 2019, it shot up 53 percent to 6,272, a number that hadn’t been seen for nearly 30 years. (The true number of deaths is even higher than this because the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration doesn’t count people killed by cars in places like driveways and parking lots. The National Safety Council estimates the total number of pedestrian deaths are likely about 24 percent higher than NHTSA numbers show.) As a result, these deaths have made up an increasingly large share of total car fatalities over the last few decades, from 11 percent in the early 2000s to about 18 percent in 2025. None of this has happened in other wealthy countries, nearly all of which brought down their pedestrian fatality rates in the 2010s rather than raise them.
Why did it suddenly become so much more dangerous to be a pedestrian in America? There’s almost certainly no single reason, but most experts I’ve spoken to over the years have pointed to the growing popularity of SUVs and pickup trucks, which have soared in popularity and now make up an overwhelming share of car purchases in the US. These vehicles often make it harder for drivers to see pedestrians, and they’re more likely to seriously injure or kill people on foot because of their added weight and height.
“You can take the same speed crash and break some legs, or you can take the same crash speed and crush some ribs and destroy someone’s organs,” said Stephen Mattingly, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington, describing the difference between being hit by a stout sedan and a tall SUV.
In a recent interview with Bloomberg, University of New Mexico engineering professor Nick Ferenchak, one of the country’s leading researchers on pedestrian and bicyclist safety, pointed to another, intriguing theory: Maybe there are just more pedestrians now. Not because Americans have suddenly discovered a love of long walks, but because an increasing number of people living outside pedestrian-friendly city centers can’t afford to get around any other way.
“There is a lot of evidence pointing to suburbanization of poverty being an important factor,” he said, with a growing share of low-income people who may not be able to afford cars living in suburbs where everyone is expected to get around by car. It is often especially dangerous to walk along the wide, high-speed roads ubiquitous in American suburbs, which are not designed to safely accommodate pedestrians and where drivers don’t expect to encounter people on foot.
But whether or not pedestrian volumes have increased enough to explain much of the sudden rise in deaths is hard to know. The US closely tracks the total number of miles driven by all cars in the country every year — a statistic known as vehicle miles traveled (VMT) — but we don’t have an equivalent “total miles walked” denominator for pedestrians.
One reason cars kill so many people in the US is because we drive so much. Large steel boxes traveling at 50 miles per hour are inherently dangerous, and when we build a transportation system that prioritizes the rapid movement of cars and marginalizes other forms of getting around, we should not be surprised when the results are very deadly. But during the pandemic, something unexpected happened: total driving across the country dipped, but we saw a spike in crash deaths. Overall car fatalities increased by 7 percent in 2020 and another 11 percent in 2021, and pedestrian deaths similarly shot up.
The most widely accepted theory for why this happened is that in normal periods, routine traffic congestion slows cars down. But without road congestion during Covid, it suddenly became possible for drivers to go really fast and cause more fatal crashes — a shift that was enabled by the very design of roads in the US. That emptier roads so easily turned into deadlier ones displayed some of the fundamental flaws in the American approach to transportation: The same fatality spikes generally didn’t happen in peer countries, which had been prioritizing road safety in the decades prior, particularly the safety of people outside cars, and took steps to slow traffic on their roads because speed is the central variable that makes crashes deadly. They lowered speed limits and, to ensure the new speed limits were actually followed, embraced traffic calming measures like narrower roads to make speeding physically infeasible.
In the 2010s, many US cities took up Vision Zero, a campaign to eliminate traffic deaths that was originally conceived in Europe in the 1990s. It rejects the premise that deaths by car cannot be avoided, and emphasizes designing transportation systems where people don’t encounter conditions in which someone’s split-second mistake can easily turn fatal. But Vision Zero’s implementation has largely been regarded as a failure in America, in part because it is so hard to get the public to accept changes to road design that inconvenience cars. Traffic enforcement cameras also make a significant difference in deterring speeding in countries where they’re widely implemented, but in the US, they’re culturally anathema and in some places are even banned at the state level.
Mattingly, the civil engineering professor, at times sounds despairing when he talks about the prospect of making it safer to walk in the US: “The public generally don’t consider pedestrians valuable because they’re just getting in the way of them being able to drive fast to where they want to go,” he said. “And that is an incredibly bitter pill to try to swallow.”
It would be hard to deny that car fatalities generally, and pedestrian safety especially, lacks salience in the US. More than twice as many pedestrians may die here each year than the number killed in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but these deaths occur scattershot and just infrequently enough that they can feel to many like an inevitable cost of modern transportation, rather than a policy choice. As long as that’s the case, it will be hard to change the car-dominated, 20th-century planning paradigm that prevails in the US, even as most urban planners now agree it was a mistake.
But the US need not become Amsterdam to save many people’s lives — remember that Canada and Australia, with post-war, car-dependent built environments similar to those found in the US, manage to kill many fewer pedestrians than the US does. On the margins, there are certainly technological fixes that could make a dent in the problem without fundamentally altering the American urban form or sacrificing the convenience of drivers. Automatic emergency braking that detects pedestrians, which is now being widely adopted in new cars in the US, can reduce deadly collisions considerably, though it’s still far from perfect. Judging from Waymo’s record, self-driving cars, too, are likely to be a lot safer for pedestrians than human-driven ones — although many experts, including Mattingly, worry that widespread adoption of driverless vehicles could further entrench the marginalization of pedestrians, if we don’t make the active choice to prioritize non-motorists.
In the long run, America ought to have bigger aspirations for the future of walking. That calls not just for technological shifts, though we surely need those, but for a philosophical one as well. Countries that have minimized pedestrian deaths have embraced walking as a wondrous, efficient transportation technology that for the last century has been wrongly sidelined by the automobile. Walking is, as Solnit wrote, “a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned.” The transportation system of the future, if we want it, will allow it to flourish again.
2026-04-27 18:00:00
你了解你的邻居吗？你能向他们寻求帮助吗？互联网及其无限连接的承诺让人们忽视了这种人际关系，而这种关系过去更为常见。但如今，这种趋势正在逆转：美国人重新发现邻里关系的价值。本月的封面故事由萨拉·拉丁为 Vox 撰写，探讨了“邻里主义”的兴起以及建立强大本地社区在情感、社交和实际层面带来的益处。本期其他内容还包括：动物收容所工作人员面临的同情疲劳危机；当青少年参与“让美国再次健康”运动时会发生什么；以及你在家中杀死害虫是否应该感到内疚。
你在家中杀死害虫是否应该感到内疚？
作者：西加尔·萨缪尔
MAHA 健康文化正在影响青少年，成年人尚未准备好
作者：安娜·诺斯（4月28日出版）
可再生能源打破了百年来的传统
作者：布莱恩·沃尔什（4月28日出版）
什么困扰着美国动物收容所工作人员？
作者：肯尼·托雷拉（4月29日出版）
为什么“邻里主义”正在成为潮流？
作者：萨拉·拉丁（4月30日出版）
双胞胎能教会我们关于友谊的什么？
作者：艾莉·沃尔佩（5月1日出版）
How well do you know your neighbors? Could you ask them for a favor? The internet and its promise of limitless connectivity has led many people to overlook those kinds of connections, which used to be far more common. But things are starting to shift back the other way: Americans are rediscovering the value of relationships next door. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Sara Radin reports for Vox on the rise of “neighborism” and the benefits — emotional, social, and practical — of cultivating a strong local community. Also in this issue: The compassion fatigue crisis facing animal shelter workers. What happens when teenagers embrace the Make America Healthy Again movement? And should you feel guilty for killing the bugs in your house?
By Sigal Samuel
By Anna North
Coming April 28
By Bryan Walsh
Coming April 28
By Kenny Torrella
Coming April 29
By Sara Radin
Coming April 30
By Allie Volpe
Coming May 1
2026-04-27 18:00:00
《你的里程可能各有不同》是一档提供道德困境思考框架的建议专栏，其核心理念基于“价值多元主义”，即每个人都有多种相互冲突但同样合理的价值观。读者可以通过匿名表单提交问题。本周一位读者的问题如下：春天来了，害虫也重新出现。我家父母的房子有蚂蚁问题，我发现了谷仓里的象鼻虫，也听说有人家中有黄蜂侵扰，蜱虫季节也已开始，去年的床 bugs 事件令人真正感到创伤。我不喜欢杀死昆虫，但如果它们未经邀请进入我的空间，且无法轻易带出并防止其再次进入，我也会这么做。但即使如此，我仍会感到内疚，因为我认为昆虫可能有感知能力，所以尽量快速地处理，但这种选择仍让我感到不光彩。我认为害虫和其他生物一样具有一定的道德价值，但它们与我们的空间存在冲突。那么，杀死它们是否道德？是否有更伦理的方式处理？
亲爱的“虫害求助”，我欣赏你对微小生物痛苦的敏感，希望你永远保持这种态度。但我也希望你能放下内疚感。虽然昆虫是否感知痛苦尚不确定，但近年来科学家已积累证据表明某些昆虫具有意识，能体验愉悦或痛苦。例如，蜜蜂会主动寻求尼古丁和咖啡因等致幻物质，且能有意识地感受疼痛，而非单纯反射。2022年的一项研究显示，蜜蜂会权衡利弊，选择面对不适的热量去获取糖分，这表明它们具备权衡能力，是意识的体现。果蝇则表现出“快感缺失”（类似人类抑郁症症状），使用人类抗抑郁药可缓解其状态。
一位同事曾坦言，这类证据让她感到极度内疚，认为自己是“果蝇纳粹”。但关键在于，即使昆虫有感知能力，这并不意味着我们必须以它们的利益为最高优先级。道德考量不仅涉及它们的内在能力，还涉及它们与我们的关系。例如，我们不会期待发现床 bugs 时选择“共存”，而是会采取灭杀行动，因为与害虫的冲突无法通过沟通解决，我们有责任保护自身安全。
哲学家艾莉森·安德森（Elizabeth Anderson）认为，道德义务的判断取决于具体情境和关系，而非固定标准。她指出，人类历史上曾依赖动物生存，而现代才逐渐赋予动物道德地位。她强调，我们对不同物种的道德义务不同，这不仅与它们的智力或感知能力有关，也与它们是否依赖我们、是否与我们敌对等因素相关。
正如原住民作家罗宾·沃尔·金默（Robin Wall Kimmerer）在《编织甜蜜草》一书中所描述的，她清理池塘时发现其中充满蝌蚪和微小生物，虽然理论上认为所有生命都有价值，但在实践中需要权衡。她选择优先考虑人类需求，但尽量减少对小生命的伤害，将多余生物投入堆肥，以延续生命循环。
因此，作者建议采取“伤害最小化”原则：在可能的情况下与昆虫共存，尽量减少杀害数量；若必须杀害，应选择快速无痛的方式（如直接压碎而非使用毒药）。这种做法不仅对昆虫有益，也能保护我们自身的道德品质。无意识或冷漠地伤害任何生物都会削弱我们对生命的敬畏，而这种敬畏才是我们应坚持的。
额外推荐：一篇关于“蚯蚓感受”的文章揭示了达尔文对蚯蚓意识的痴迷；一篇关于优生学历史的 Aeon 文章指出，上世纪30年代部分残障人士曾支持绝育；心理学家大卫·德斯托诺（David DeSteno）的文章探讨了道德是否应基于理性，作者认为道德更多是情感驱动的，试图将其数学化本身就是不合理的。
Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:
Spring is here, which means the pests are back. My parents’ house has an ant problem. I found weevils in my pantry, and I know people with wasp infestations in their places. Tick season has begun, and last year’s bedbug scare was legitimately traumatic. I don’t like killing insects, but if they’re in my space uninvited and I can’t just take them outside and easily prevent them from coming back, I’ll do it.
But I do feel bad about doing it, even sparingly. I think it’s plausible that insects feel pain, so I try to make it quick, yet I’m still making the choice to kill them and it’s not one I’m proud of. I think that pests, like all living things, have some moral weight — but there’s not room enough for the two of us. Is it bad to kill them? Is there a more ethical way to approach this?
Dear Bugging Out,
I love that you’re sensitive to the potential suffering of Earth’s teeny-tiny, creepy-crawly creatures. I hope you never lose that. But I do hope you lose the guilt you’re feeling.
You’re right to think it’s plausible that insects feel pain. We don’t know for sure yet, but in recent years, scientists have been accumulating evidence that suggests at least some insects possess sentience — the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced, meaning they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure).
Bees, for example, appear to play — just for fun. They also actively seek out mind-altering drugs like nicotine and caffeine, which suggests there may be a mind there to alter. Plus, bees seem to experience pain consciously, not merely flinch from it by reflex. In a 2022 study, bees approached a sugary snack even though it meant facing uncomfortable heat, weighing costs against benefits in what scientists call a “motivational trade-off.” A pure automaton couldn’t do that; it would flee heat in every situation. The capacity to weigh competing drives is one of the markers of sentience.
Meanwhile, fruit flies have shown signs of anhedonia — the loss of interest in previously pleasurable things (like food) that we know as a symptom of depression in humans. Treat the flies with a human antidepressant and it’ll suppress the depression-like state in the insects, too.
Just fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does, and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here.
One of my colleagues confessed to me recently that evidence like this makes her feel super guilty: When she goes around killing these insects in her kitchen, she asks herself whether she’s “a fruit-fly Nazi.”
But the key thing to realize is this: Bugs may have some kind of sentience, and sentience may confer some moral status, but that doesn’t mean that provides the last word on how we should act toward them.
Just because another creature might have moral weight, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how to treat that creature when its welfare conflicts with the welfare of a creature you know has moral weight: you.
So, how can you know if or when it’s okay to kill a bug?
I think the most compelling response comes from Elizabeth Anderson, a contemporary philosopher who subscribes to the school of thought known as pragmatism, which sees moral truths as socially embedded and historically contingent, not fixed and objective.
Anderson points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and their energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although some non-Western societies have long ascribed moral worth to animals).
“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals,” she writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”
Anderson has noted that we feel different levels of moral obligation to different species, and that has to do not only with their intrinsic capacities like intelligence or sentience, but also with their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, or whether they live in the wild. It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us.
Thinking about pests is a great (if gross) way to bring this point home. If you find bedbugs in your house, nobody expects you to say, “Well, they’re maybe sentient and definitely alive, so they have moral value. I’ll just live and let live!” It is absolutely expected that you will exterminate the shit out of them.
Why? Because with pests, Anderson writes, “there is no possibility of communication, much less compromise. We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace…Indeed, we have an obligation to our fellow members of society (whether human or animal) to drive them out, whenever this is necessary to protect ourselves.”
Anderson’s point is not that sentience doesn’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.
Embracing this value pluralism makes things tricky. It suggests that the best we can do is look at creatures’ intelligence and sentience and relationships to us as clues about how we should negotiate life with (or without) them. But it doesn’t tell us how to weigh those clues — and what to do when they conflict with the interests of other animals, including us.
“There’s no simple formula,” Anderson once told me. “I think that’s a hopeless quest.”
That is, for my money, the most intellectually honest position. The absence of a fixed formula doesn’t mean you should exist in a state of guilty indecision or paralysis. Instead, the best thing you can do is have the integrity to recognize that sometimes life presents you with trade-offs where you have to make a choice. And when it comes to insects, you’re making that choice from a position of considerable power.
This is the conclusion Robin Wall Kimmerer reaches in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The scientist describes how she had an algae-filled pond in her yard that she wanted to clear out so her daughters could swim in it. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though, she believes that all life has moral worth. So as she raked out the muck and found that it was full of tadpoles, she plucked them all out so they could go on living. Then she inspected the pond water under her microscope and saw a ton of teensy organisms, each one a moral dilemma. She writes:
As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse.
But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil.
In a way, it’s an unsatisfying solution — a lot of us would probably sleep easier if nature came inscribed with clear bright lines and moral instructions. But there you have it. Like Kimmerer, I think you should practice a kind of harm reduction. To the extent that you can “live and let live” with insects, that’s ideal. Try to minimize how many you kill. But when you do make the choice to kill them, try to do it in a way that reduces the risk of suffering (think: quick and painless crushing rather than long and drawn-out poisoning).
That’s not only for the bug’s benefit, but for yours, too. Harming any animal can harm our character if we do it mindlessly or callously, because it desensitizes us to life. But when we let ourselves be touched by life, we can maintain our reverence for it. The reverence — not the guilt — is the thing you want to hold onto.
2026-04-27 04:45:00
2026年4月25日，华盛顿希尔顿酒店举行的白宫记者协会晚宴上发生了一起未遂袭击事件。一名持霰弹枪、手枪和刀具的男子试图闯入总统演讲所在的宴会厅安全区域，引发特勤局特工开枪。尽管一名特工被击中但未受重伤，嫌疑人最终被制服并逮捕。此次事件再次引发对美国政治安全局势的担忧，因为现场聚集了多位与政治暴力相关的知名人物，包括曾遭枪击的特朗普、因丈夫遇害而情绪崩溃的埃里卡·基尔，以及曾被左翼枪手袭击的共和党众议员斯蒂夫·斯卡利斯和民主党众议员贾雷德·莫斯基维茨。此外，CNN主持人沃尔夫·布莱泽和罗纳德·里根1981年遇刺的地点也与事件相关，后者被当地人称为“欣克利希尔顿”。
嫌疑人科尔·托马斯·艾伦（Cole Tomas Allen）是一名31岁的加州教师和工程师，据代理司法部长托德·布兰奇称，他提前预订了与晚宴相同的酒店房间，并通过火车横跨全国前往现场。据《纽约邮报》报道，艾伦在袭击前向家人发送了一份宣言，批评政府对伊朗的战争、针对可疑船只的军事打击以及移民政策，并表示他计划袭击政府官员但尽量避免伤害他人。他还提到对酒店安保措施感到意外，认为其不如预期严密。
特朗普在事件后批评了晚宴的安保措施，并多次强调此事支持他计划在原东翼拆除后建造的白宫宴会厅。尽管如此，此次晚宴由私人组织举办，场地由其自行安排，因此新场所可能不会影响本次事件。白宫记者协会晚宴作为华盛顿的传统活动，通常包括喜剧表演、总统演讲及对媒体的致敬。尽管特朗普曾因媒体对其的负面报道而抵制该活动，但今年他被邀请担任荣誉嘉宾，因此决定出席。然而，许多民主党人士似乎回避了他的出席，而媒体和新闻机构则呼吁利用此机会抗议白宫对言论自由的处理方式。
目前，艾伦预计将于周一出庭接受联邦指控，参议院也计划本周召开会议，与特勤局讨论此次袭击暴露的安全问题。
The most shocking thing about the attempted attack on the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on Saturday night at the Washington Hilton was how not shocking it was.
Even before an armed man attempted to breach the secured area outside the hotel’s ballroom, the event’s guest list was a grim self-portrait of political violence in America. President Donald Trump, who survived two attempts on his life during the 2024 campaign, was evacuated by Secret Service agents. Erika Kirk, whose husband Charlie Kirk was killed just months ago at a campus event in Utah, was rushed out in tears. Republican Rep. Steve Scalise, who in 2017 was shot by a left-wing gunman at a Congressional baseball practice, guided to safety Democratic Rep. Jared Moskowitz, who helped lead the House investigation into the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, whose network was targeted in 2018 by a serial bomber who went after Trump critics, was near the gunman when the shooting began and provided some of the first eyewitness reporting.
That’s only the recent history. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose father and uncle were each assassinated in the 1960s, was also in the room. And this year’s dinner was held at the same hotel where Ronald Regan was shot in 1981. Locals still often refer to it as “The Hinckley Hilton,” a reference to Reagan’s attacker.
Fortunately, no one was seriously hurt this time, but the incident has again rattled the American political scene, where people know from experience just how much worse it could have been.
Here’s what we know:
According to officials, a man armed with a shotgun, a handgun, and knives charged at a security checkpoint outside the ballroom where the president was set to deliver a speech at around 8:30 pm ET. One Secret Service agent was shot and hit in his body armor — Trump said later he’s “doing great” — before agents were able to subdue and arrest the suspect alive.
While there was some discussion of continuing with the event afterward, Trump said he ultimately sided with law enforcement’s recommendation to postpone it to another date.
The suspect has been identified as Cole Tomas Allen, a 31-year-old teacher and engineer from Torrance, California. He traveled across the country by train and booked a room in the same hotel as the event in advance, according to Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche.
While the investigation is ongoing, Allen reportedly sent a manifesto to family members shortly before the attack. The New York Post published a purported copy of the document, which included criticism of the administration’s war in Iran, military strikes on alleged drug boats, and deportation policies, and indicated that Allen had planned to target “administration officials” while avoiding hurting others “if possible.” He also expressed surprise in the document that the security at the hotel was relatively weaker than he expected.
In his comments after the attack, Trump criticized the security at the event and repeatedly argued that the incident bolsters the case for his planned White House ballroom, which he wants to build atop the now-demolished East Wing. The new space, though, would likely not affect this specific event. The WHCA is a private organization and thus secures its own venues.
The White House Correspondents’ Association is a nonprofit organization that represents reporters covering the White House and advocates for media access to the federal government. The group is best known for the annual fundraising dinner it was hosting on Saturday, a long-running Washington institution that typically features a keynote address by a comedian (mentalist, this time) and a comic speech by the sitting president, along with a tribute to the press and the First Amendment. It’s frequently attended by prominent members of the media, politicians, celebrities, and business leaders.
Even before Trump’s election, the dinner had long been a controversial event, with critics complaining it makes the press look too self-congratulatory or too friendly with the politicians they cover.
Trump has his own personal history with it as well: In 2011, President Barack Obama mocked him onstage after the then-Apprentice host led a national campaign to stoke false conspiracy theories around his birth certificate. Trump said in March that he boycotted the event as president in both terms “because the Press was extraordinarily bad to me,” but that he planned to attend it for the first time this year after organizers “asked me, very nicely, to be the Honoree at this year’s Dinner.” Many Democrats, in turn, appeared to be avoiding his appearance this year, while journalists and press organizations had urged attendees to use the occasion to protest the White House’s treatment of free speech issues.
Allen is expected to appear in federal court on Monday to face charges. Senators are planning to schedule a briefing with the Secret Service this week to discuss security issues raised by the attack.