As our country — and much of the world — moves away from a collective agreement on basic facts, it’s even more important for journalism, the fourth pillar of democracy, to remain strong and dynamic. A relatively new discipline of that pillar is data journalism.

A little over a year ago I was reminded how data journalism can reveal some surprising facts. It was when I read this article, Why are so many American pedestrians dying at night?

This key graphic shows the correlation between dusk and pedestrian deaths, with the month, the Y-axis, making the surge unmistakable:

This trend is relatively new. And when the talented data detectives at the New York Times examined the same data from other developed countries, primarily in the European Union, they couldn’t see the same trend. Thus the emphasis in the article on American pedestrian deaths.

I urge you to read the engrossing report, but I’ll provide a bit of a spoiler on one reason why this might be a problem our country alone owns, similar to the frequent mass murders from military-grade weapons (a reminder of this is the perennial headline from the satrical publication The Onion, posted after each national tragedy, ‘No Way to Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens).

David Strayer, a psychologist who studies driving at the University of Utah, [stated] “What has changed is the amount of technology that we’re surrounding ourselves with.”

Smartphones — and the way they can distract both drivers and pedestrians — aren’t uniquely American. But there is one thing that is still distinctly so: the pervasiveness in the U.S. of automatic transmissions, which help free up a driver’s hand for other uses. Just 1 percent of all new passenger vehicles sold this year in the U.S. had manual transmissions, according to the online car-shopping resource Edmunds. In Europe, manual transmissions are declining in popularity as a share of new light vehicles sold. But they still make up about 70 to 75 percent of cars on the road.

If this is true, you may chalk this up, as I do, to misplaced distrust over technology and how new technologies interact to produce dangerous unintended consequences.

I’ve driven manual transmissions. In fact, I learned to drive with one, in an ancient, hilariously fashioned tank called the AMC Gremlin. And I can imagine that using a cell phone while driving with a manual transmission becomes much harder if not impossible. Make it easier for me to use my phone while driving, especially as conditions around me darken, and I can see my divided attention missing an unexpected person in my path.

For all of the moral panic about an AI-driven autonomous vehicles in some vague future, it may have distracted us from this hidden inconvenient truth: The technologies that are combining right now to kill far too many people on our roads are actually our phones and our transmissions.