Getting out of your car on an active highway is actually much more likely to kill you than staying in it - you instantly go from a big, strong noticeable metal cage (hopefully with flashing lights on) to a small, soft, very fragile person. People who don't see a car on the shoulder also don't see a person walking.
>However, more than half the deaths and almost 1 in 5 serious injuries occur when a vehicle strikes a pedestrian who is leaving, working on, or returning to a stopped vehicle.
Is a breakdown of the different groups available?
• Leaving
• Working on
• Returning to
I agree that groups 2 and 3 are to be strongly encouraged against.
Group 1, choosing to leave your vehicle and stand off the road, behind solid infrastructure, is actively reducing their risk, albeit at the tradeoff of being briefly exposed to traffic.
I wouldn't recommend anyone exit a vehicle into fast moving traffic. For my comment above, I condsidered adding "if a suitable break in the traffic appears", but I decided it was overly wordy and to some extent self-evident.
https://www.iihs.org/news/detail/stopped-vehicle-crashes-res...