Three Decades of Rising Pedestrian Deaths
One of the many issues facing cities of all sizes is the walk-ability. The same infrastructure that puts cyclists at risk also puts pedestrians in similarly dangerous situations. We’ve designed our roadways and transportation around cars; we need to design for people.
A century of relatively cheap oil has impacted more than just the environment. For over one hundred years, many cities, states, and entire countries designed their roadways to maximize the use of the internal combustion engine. Streets were built and designed to put as many cars and trucks as possible in motion. Only in rare pockets of the United States did communities remember the importance of mass transit and non-motorized transportation. Cars almost always were the priority, and very often were the only focus of road construction.
Just as importantly, all of this focus changed how we view roads. Car-centricity became car supremacy. Generations of Americans learned that cars belong in the road, and people do not. We gave cars and their drivers a sense of ownership, a sense of exclusivity that, today, we now pay a heavy toll for.
The combination of infrastructure and design, primacy and ownership, has had deadly consequences. Pedestrian deaths have risen in the US year after year. In 2018, over 6,000 pedestrians were killed by motorists in the United States. That’s a part of an alarming trend that has seen a dramatic increase in pedestrian deaths over the past three decades.
Factors include more than just design. Distraction has played a bigger role since 2009, with the rise of smartphones becoming a contributing factor. It’s not just drivers, either. Pedestrians, too, are walking while distracted. Additionally, socioeconomic factors are changing where we walk, too. When people who can’t afford to drive are forced out of city centers by higher living costs, they’re walking and cycling in suburban communities that were never designed to be safe for foot traffic. Altogether, it’s a perfect recipe for disaster.
Perhaps the best proof that all of these factors are especially dangerous for non-motorized traffic is to compare it to issues on the open road. Overall, traffic deaths are down in states like New York, even as their death toll for pedestrians increases. In the United States, traffic incidents are down 6% in the years spanning 2008 to 2017. Over that same time period, pedestrian deaths have gone up by 35%. To be blunt, cars are getting safer, but only when they’re around other cars; no aspect of technology or changes to traffic behavior has helped non-motorized traffic like cyclists or pedestrians.
Another interesting look at these deaths is how highly-concentrated the statistics are to just five states. Almost half of all pedestrian deaths occur in Florida, Arizona, California, Georgia, and Texas. Florida is the worst of even those five states, home to eight of the ten most dangerous cities in the country.
Florida, like many other states, has implemented any number of programs to reduce speeds, change the most dangerous streets, educated both drivers and pedestrians, and do more to study what factors amplify dangerous conditions that cause so many deaths. These are solvable problems if we can get legislators to focus on the issues and the causes. In 2019, 33 people died from vaping and the federal government banned sales. It’s a crime that over six thousand people are killed and there’s a lack of urgency, anger, or action to make things right.
What are you doing to improve the non-motorized infrastructure in your community? Are there roads or routes that are known to be dangerous in your town? Let us know in the comments.
Further reading: Pedestrian Deaths in U.S. Approach Highest Number in Nearly 30 Years, Study Shows
What we know about the mysterious vaping-linked illness and deaths