Also notable in the report are the figures for crashes involving large trucks. While overall fatalities in such crashes rose slightly in 2018 — up 0.9 percent from the year before — the number of pedestrians and cyclists killed by large trucks shot up by 9.7 percent.

Distracted driving probably plays a part as well, researchers said. About 10 percent of fatal crashes involve a distracted driver, and about 3.2 percent of drivers on the road on any given day are talking on cellphones.

“Driving distraction continues to be a big issue,” said Tom Dingus, the director of the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

Pedestrians can be glued to their cellphones, too, although it is unclear how often that leads to a fatality.

A report released in August by the New York City Department of Transportation found that walking and texting was rarely to blame for pedestrian deaths, but Professor Dingus and others cautioned that not enough research has been done to say definitively how often cellphone-distracted pedestrians are partially responsible for crashes.

“The days when your mother told you to look both ways before you cross the street are going by the wayside,” Professor Dingus said.

Urban areas are where the trouble is.

Over the last decade, pedestrian deaths remained nearly the same in rural areas but rose 69 percent in urban areas. Cyclist deaths have also risen significantly in those areas, up 48 percent over the decade from 2009 to 2018. Those increases far outpace population growth in urban areas, which the Census Bureau estimates at 13 percent from 2008 to 2017, according to the report.