Pedestrian deaths are on the rise in this country. The Governors Highway Safety Association estimated, based on data from the first half of the year, that 6,227 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents in 2018. This would be a whopping 50 percent more than were killed in 2009. Adjusted for population, the increase hasn’t been quite so steep, and seems like it might have halted after 2016. But after decades of declines, the turnaround since 2009 is still awful.
Among the explanations that have been trotted out:
More cars are on the road, with vehicle miles driven rebounding after a big drop during the recession. More people are texting while driving, which wasn’t much of a thing before 2007, when the iPhone was introduced. More people are driving sport utility vehicles, which are harder to stop than cars and two to three times likelier to kill you if they hit you.
Those all make sense. But why is it, then, that New York City has seen a decline in pedestrian fatalities since 2009?
The city embarked five years ago on a Vision Zero program to reduce traffic fatalities, so that may be a factor. But the bigger issue seems to be that densely populated, pedestrian-packed cities such as New York simply aren’t where the main problem is these days.
The most pedestrians are getting killed in sprawling Sun Belt cities not known for having lots of pedestrians. In their suburbs, too.
Pedestrians are getting killed … where [they] weren’t supposed to be.
Most of the fatal accidents, and most of the increase, happened on arterials – those high-capacity roads of four lanes or more, often lined with strip malls, fast-food outlets and motels, that are such a defining (if less than universally admired) element of the modern, American-built environment.
Pedestrian deaths have been on the rise along freeways, too, up 33 percent since 2009, compared with a 64 percent rise in fatalities on arterials.
These crashes generally aren’t happening at intersections, which makes sense given that freeways don’t have any and arterial roads keep them to a minimum.
Where pedestrians are getting killed, then, is where there weren’t supposed to be any pedestrians. On freeways they’re generally not allowed at all, while along arterial roads the provisions made for them are often so sparse as to be worse than useless.
Local authorities have often reacted to these tragedies by blaming the pedestrians for walking where they shouldn’t. A more constructive response would be to set up more places for pedestrians to cross safely, especially near transit stops.
But change is going to be difficult and slow given that these roads and neighborhoods were designed around the assumption that no one would be walking, drivers have more political clout than pedestrians and the victims tend to be poor.
Poor people often have to walk because they don’t have access to a car. Governing magazine did an investigation a few years ago that found that pedestrian death rates rose as neighborhood incomes fell.
One final twist is the age breakdown. Kids are now the group least at risk of getting killed while walking, which wasn’t always the case. And while those 70 and older remain the highest-risk group, their fatality rate has plummeted from several times that of other adults to barely higher.
The decline in the fatality rate for those 12 and under seems to be a happy side effect of the otherwise much-lamented rise of helicopter parenting.
With older pedestrians, one reason for the higher fatality rate is that they’re more likely to succumb to any injuries they suffer. Another is that, well, they’re slow – and as a result are, according to a 1993 study, “overrepresented in intersection crashes (particularly involving turning vehicles) and in crashes involving wide street crossings.”
That elderly Americans are so much less likely to be victimized in such crashes than they were in the 1970s and 1980s has got to be in large part because they’re now so much more likely to be behind the wheel. The percentage of elderly Americans below the poverty line fell by more than half from the late 1960s to 2000, meaning that more could afford cars, while the share of those 70 and older with driver’s licenses rose from 46 percent in 1975 to 81 percent in 2016.
None of this is meant to absolve texting while driving or SUVs from blame. But it does seem like the rise in pedestrian deaths might have some broader societal and demographic causes, too. n
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist.
