Cars today have airbags, antilock brakes, traction control. They have back-up cameras, blind spot sensors, inattentive driving alarms.

Cars are safer than they have ever been, yet sharing the road with them is increasingly dangerous.

We know this in awful, personal ways.

John Austin Greenman, a Mancelona man on the cusp of 30, was struck and killed by a car on Friday night near the Chain O’ Lakes Campground. Troopers are still looking for the pickup truck driver who may have killed him.

The moral turpitude needed to leave a person by the side of the road is beyond our reckoning, and it is our hope that the driver responsible for his death will come forward with information to 989-732-2778.

But beyond the added horror of a hit and run, Greenman’s death joins a growing roster of walkers, bikers, street-crossers killed by cars on our region’s roadways. A stack of eulogies for those gone before their time. A 19-year-old jogger on a morning run. A 77-year-old getting groceries killed in a parking lot. A 71-year-old visitor crossing the street after a fireworks show. A 29-year-old bartender riding her bike home after her work shift.

Numbers are climbing state- and nation-wide reports Bridge Michigan. Pedestrian fatalities hit a 24-year high last year in Michigan, with 183 people killed by cars. Nationally, pedestrian deaths rose 54 percent in the last decade, spiking faster than any other traffic fatality, according to a Governors Highway Safety Association report.

Even as overall crash numbers went down during the lockdown days of COVID-19 in Michigan, fatalities rose.

The whys are still elusive as a number of deadly factors could be at work — more SUVs and trucks on the road that make injury a slim hope for a pedestrian in a crash; more texting and phone fiddling by distracted drivers; dangerous intersections; ignorance of pedestrian right-of-way laws; COVID-19-related road rage.

Whatever the reason, we must do better. Our myriad and plentiful safety devices outfitting our vehicles may protect those within, but they won’t save the people we could potentially hit.

Taking the wheel must be a pledge of protection — and of responsibility when things go bad. We share the road. We share the grief.

— Traverse City Record-Eagle