Any attempt to blame it primarily on phones has to wrangle with the fact that those phones are available and in use everywhere on the planet, not just the USA.
I was thinking the same, but many other countries have drivers and pedestrians more separated, to while the distraction, from either the driver or the pedestrians is still a problem, it's mitigated by the greater distance between the two.
Still the "on drug or drunk" for the pedestrians is wild.
My only critique of this is that maybe the countries they compared started to invested in safer urban driving infrastructure during the Lehman shock, and its counteracting the universal growth in distractedness
