Combating The Rise In Pedestrian Deaths In The US

0:07The United States has a problem with traffic safety. Over the last decade, pedestrian death rates in high-income countries decreased by nearly 30 percent. Meanwhile, the number of pedestrians struck and killed by vehicles in the U.S. jumped 70 percent between 2010 and 2023. That's according to a new analysis by The Washington Post. And pedestrians are still being killed with alarming frequency with thousands more injured each year. This in spite of the adoption of traffic safety initiatives like Vision Zero in cities across the country. So why have our roads become so much more dangerous for pedestrians?

0:43And what can we do to make them safer? We get into it after the break. I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. Stay with us. We've got a lot to get to.

0:57Joining us in studio to talk about it is Ian Duncan. He's a reporter at The Washington Post covering federal transportation agencies and the politics of transportation. He and his colleagues recently published an investigation titled The Deadliest Roads in America. Ian, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Also with us is Gabe Klein. He's founder of Adapt Impact. That's a consulting business advising companies and governments on urban innovation, public-private partnerships, and change management. He's also former transportation chief for Chicago and Washington, D.C. Gabe, welcome back to the program.

1:29Thanks for having me, Jen. And Beth Osborne. She's president and CEO of Smart Growth America. She served in the U.S. Department of Transportation as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Transportation Policy under President Obama. Beth, welcome to 1A. Glad to be here. And we want to hear from you. Have you or a loved one been struck by an automobile while on foot? Do you live near a notoriously dangerous intersection? How would you like to see government officials make our streets safer for pedestrians? Email us at 1A at WAMU.org. Now, Ian, pedestrian deaths hit a 40-year high in 2022, more than 20 Americans a day dying after being struck by cars and trucks.

2:08And those numbers have gone down slightly since then. But how have these trends evolved over the years? Yeah, I mean, what we have really seen after a kind of low point in about 2009, that it was just a pretty consistent increase. I think this issue got a lot of attention during the COVID pandemic when transportation patterns changed and the number of deaths really did shoot up. But it really goes back further than that. And that is what we wanted to get into, that this is something that's been building over more than a decade. And even though we've seen a slight kind of reduction from those pandemic era highs, this is by no means a problem that's been solved or is going to go away.

2:48Well, it's interesting because you describe the U.S. road safety situation is a public health crisis tied to vehicle speed, weight, and road design. And I want to play a message we got from Greg. I'm a resident anesthesiologist at a level one trauma center in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I often provide medical care for patients injured in pedestrian versus vehicle MPCs, and I wanted to share a perspective from inside the operating room. When a pedestrian is struck by a car, the injuries are rarely isolated. Instead, we see complex polytrauma, splenic and liver lacerations, major vascular damage, brain and spinal cord injuries, rib fractures, and more.

3:25These are incredibly painful and life-altering injuries that often require massive blood transfusions, multiple surgeries, and prolonged ICU stays. And many of these victims are young adults who should have had decades of health ahead of them. Improving multimodal transportation isn't just a policy discussion. It's a matter of preventing devastating injuries and giving our neighbors a chance at safer, healthier lives. Greg, thanks for that insight. Gabe, what do we understand about what's making our roads unsafe for pedestrians? Yeah, it's a combination of speed, weight, distraction. And so there are engineering solutions to these problems.

4:07But my feeling is that if you go to the top of the hierarchy, we've got a bit of a moral crisis going on. we've got a cultural crisis. I think Ian is absolutely right. This is a medical emergency in the United States. Up until 2020, the number one cause of death for young people was car accidents, crashes, crashes, if you will. Now it's firearms. Firearms and car crashes are number one and number two if you're between the ages of one to 19 or 10 to 19. That's a huge problem. Until we culturally accept that this is unacceptable, I think it's going to be very hard to make the change. I worked in state government, local government, federal government, and fundamentally, the people do have a lot of power.

4:57And we've seen it in other countries when people say, we will not accept this anymore, things change. Beth, your organization's research shows that pedestrian danger has increased almost everywhere, but especially in sunbelt cities. What are the most persistent design failures behind this crisis? It's a really important question. Most of those Sun Belt areas, I grew up in Louisiana, so I'm very familiar, were built out after World War II. So very much with interstate design in mind for their roadways, more sprawling development patterns. So what you'll see is these very wide roadways with very wide lanes and not a lot of places where you have to stop along the way.

5:42And in fact, if you dig into the engineering behind it, you'll find out that there is a design speed for the roadway. The engineers have designed it with a certain speed in mind. That is not the same thing as the posted speed. So the speed limit might be 30 miles per hour, but the design speed could be 45 miles per hour. So you'll see people will drive the design speed because the design's screaming at them all the time. They're seeing the speed limit every half mile or so. So we take their money, we design the road to tell them to do the wrong thing, and then we penalize them for following the design that we built.

6:23But what's at the heart of that disconnect between the stated speed limit and what the road is actually designed to encourage? Because there's this belief that the safest thing we can do is understand that people will speed and make it possible for them to do so and potentially lose control of their vehicle and regain it without crashing into a building or another car. So we encourage speed, and we encourage speed in places that are full of conflicts so that the driver has less opportunity to spot a potential conflict and stop in time, which means more crashes and more deadly crashes. Ian, what people in communities are at highest risk as pedestrians?

7:09Yeah, so what we've found is that these are overwhelmingly poor communities, communities with large numbers of racial minority residents. And I think maybe kind of intuitively, but pretty tellingly, communities where levels of car ownership is far below the national average. And so people have to walk to get to where they want to go. Well, you also analyzed geographical data across the country, and you found stroads. These are hybrid streets and highways. They're at the center of a lot of the hot spots where these incidents happen. Why are stroads so deadly? Yeah, so it kind of gets back to what Beth was talking about, that they're roads that are sort of trying to do two things, and they end up doing neither of them particularly well.

7:58They're trying to move cars at high speed, long distances, but they have businesses along the side of them. They often have neighborhoods just behind the businesses and that is sort of the source of the foot traffic. And so you have people trying to cross. Often there's not a safe place for them to cross without going a long way out of their way. And especially when it's dark in the evening, they're very difficult to see. It's very difficult for drivers to stop and avoid a crash. And so that's where you see a lot of these fatalities. I'd love to jump in and just say back in the 1950s, we already knew that designing surface streets for high speeds was dangerous, which is why we built the interstate system in the first place.

8:40The engineers said, we need to allow drivers to go faster over long distances, but it would be crazy to do that on our surface roads because that would be dangerous. And then we went on to forget that and to apply a one-size-fits-all interstate style design on every kind of roadway. and now we're puzzled as to why they're unsafe. Yeah, and people who are perhaps walking or trying to access public transportation, they may be crossing the intersection to get to a bus. Or a school. Or a school, right. We got this comment about vehicle size. Could the increase in pedestrian casualties be a result in the vehicles we now drive?

9:17The front of new SUV and pickup trucks are around four feet in height. It used to be if a pedestrian was hit, it was below the waist because vehicles were lower. With higher vehicle injuries occur, with higher vehicles, injuries occur above the waist where the vital organs lead to more life-threatening injuries. Gabe? Yeah, absolutely. Larger vehicles, heavier vehicles. There was something I was reading, maybe it was in your article, Ian, but it used to be that like 30 % of people in some places were killed when they were hit by a car. And now it's 70%. And the weight of the vehicle is a big reason and the size.

9:54And I will say also the ability in those large vehicles for people to see outside of the vehicle and see the pedestrians. And to your point, Jen, about people walking to transit, we have more people walking and biking, you know, the basic forms of transportation in our cities than we ever have. So the conflicts are increased. And if we don't change the road design to match the mode shift that we're seeing, right, we're seeing more people using these other modes, then we're just – it's a recipe for disaster. And I think actually the mitigations that cities have put in place – we're sitting here in D.C.

10:32You see the bollards everywhere. You see the leading ped interval so people can get a jump ahead of the car and walk across the street. Those are working. The question is, without those, how much worse would it be? Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more of the conversation in just a moment.

10:54We'll get back to our panel in a moment, but first, let's talk to Charles Brown. He's founder and CEO of Equitable Cities. That's an urban planning, public policy, and research firm. He's also the author of the new book, Arrested Mobility, Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement. Charles, welcome to 1A. Thank you for having me. So your organization works on issues of transportation, health, and equity. Where do you see race and income intersecting with this topic of traffic safety? Well, I think we have to look at the history as to why black and brown communities have been disproportionately harmed.

11:28When we go back for generations, what we know is that black and brown neighborhoods have faced underinvestment. They have faced the highway construction that have gone through their cores. We've seen a removal of sidewalks and transit, and we've also seen aggressive enforcement instead of infrastructure fixes. So when you look at it, these patterns, which has been documented throughout history, have been rooted in redlining, urban renewal, and quite frankly, exclusionary planning. Unfortunately, these have created environments where, you know, the people walk more, drive less, and face more dangerous roads with fewer safety improvements.

12:11And that couldn't be more true than in black-brown communities. So that's how race plays a role in this particular context. A part of your work focuses on the duality of safety. That's traffic and personal safety. And I think you outlined it well there. How should transportation agencies account for that duality when they're designing safe streets, particularly in communities of color? Well, quite frankly, unfortunately, they don't consider it enough. And traffic safety and personal safety overlap because people make mobility decisions based on both. And so, as we all know, a well-designed street means little if residents fear policing, if they fear violence or harassment on their way to and from a bus stop.

12:58Also, what we've seen as a result of concerns around crime is that governments tend to actually widen roads or reduce pedestrian access. This makes streets even more dangerous in those communities. And so I think the point here to make is that true safety requires physical protection as well as social protection. Well, you did some research in Newark, New Jersey, and people there avoided crosswalks because they feared crime at intersections more than they feared the traffic. What does that say to you about the limits of traditional engineering solutions? What that tells me is that we're not taking into consideration the duality of safety, that these communities are concerned not just about traffic safety, but also personal safety.

13:46And we're stuck in this car-centric bubble, this mindset of trying to get people as quickly as possible from one destination to another. And as a result, we're ignoring their personal safety concerns in these communities. And we can address both through engineering, but also through some social investments as well. What kind of social investments? So when we look at social investments, we need stronger community networks. We need to reestablish the trust between local government and residents in these communities. But we also need fair policing because design can only go so far. In your research, you find that many of the drivers who kill pedestrians in cities don't live in those neighborhoods.

14:33How do you think that should shape discussions about accountability, about enforcement, about community-focused design? That's a great, great question. I've seen this in some cases, not all cases. I want to be clear here. But when we think about, generally speaking, when most victims live in the neighborhood, but a lot of the drivers cutting through do not, the power dynamic shifts. So residents bear the harm, but the visitors, the commuters, and the passenger-through drivers shape the risk. And so what this does is complicates solutions because the people who harm the most have the least influence over the built environment, while the people who are causing much of the danger often resist change, like the very things that are needed from a design standpoint, like traffic calming, lower speeds, or design-based enforcement.

15:28I want to make sure we acknowledge the fact that the Trump administration has prioritized eliminating research that involves diversity, equity, and inclusion. So, for example, a recent New York Times analysis found a steep reduction in the share of NIH grants at the National Institutes of Health whose titles or abstracts include words like equity or racial minority or underserved patient. Charles, what harm do you anticipate if issues of race and income are not specifically prioritized in future infrastructure research and decisions? Well, I certainly hope that it is brought back because it is so important to center race and equity in these conversations.

16:11Because if we don't, if equity and race disappears from road safety, we risk repeating the past. And what we have in the past and we will have in the present is more enforcement rather than the engineering and design we've discussed. We'll have more displacement rather than investment, and we'll have more deaths as a result in those very communities. We'll also see resources flow towards places with more political power instead of those with the greatest need. So ultimately, when we're having this discussion about race and equity, removing it means removing accountability. And that's unfortunate because the people who have historically been harmed will continue paying the highest price.

16:57That's Charles Brown. He's founder and CEO of Equitable Cities and author of the new book Arrested Mobility, Overcoming the Threat to Black Movement. Charles, thank you for speaking with us. Thank you for having me. I would really love to hear from each of you, especially around what Charles just laid out to us about the way black and brown communities specifically are being impacted. Go ahead. A couple things. We have to just decide if we are designing our roads for the people that live in that community or we're designing for people to cut through from the suburbs back to the city. And this goes back to white flight.

17:35And Charles and I have talked about this, you know, going back to the 1950s and 60s where, you know, wealthier white people fled. And then the communities became racetracks, basically. And now that you have white people that have moved back into cities, more affluent people moving back and raising families, they have more political power. And they're like, this is unacceptable. We want solutions and mitigations. And then you have, as Ian's reported, people moving out to the edge of the city. I saw this in Chicago. I see it here in D.C. And then the speedways move there or they don't get dealt with there because they don't have the political power.

18:17And I just think fundamentally it's like, are we going to design for the communities where people live? Are we going to design for people to race through as fast as possible? There's a whole bunch of engineering mitigations that can be done. There's speed cameras and there's a lot of technology also. But that's not necessarily the macro answer. The macro answer is changing our thinking. I think that's what Charles is saying. Ian, I'd love to hear your thoughts, especially as it aligns to the reporting you've done at the Washington Post. Yeah, I mean, the two roads that we ended up really focusing on in Memphis, one of them is this street that is essentially five lanes and it just cuts right through the middle of a neighborhood.

18:57And there's houses on one side, houses on the other. There's a decent amount of activity along this road. And it's through this community that people who grew up there said has kind of declined, that there was changes that came in with school integration and busing and all of that that changed the kind of character of this neighborhood in their view. But what you have cutting through the middle of it is just this incredibly high speed road that is really kind of connecting two places outside the neighborhood together. And when you go there and see it, it's just very, very clear. Yeah. Well, anytime we do a program about road safety, about pedestrians, we get a lot of comments about pedestrian behavior.

19:40We got this from Terry in Flint, who says, one thing I haven't heard mentioned yet is the excessive use of cell phones by both pedestrians and drivers. As a professional driver, I feel like I've seen many, many incidents where the pedestrian was at fault due to not paying attention to their surroundings because they were on their phones. And Robert asks, to what extent does the increase of auto deaths depend on auto or road factors versus pedestrian behavior and choices? Beth? Sure. One thing that I think is really important to keep in mind is how we rate as a country in terms of our roadway safety versus other countries.

20:16And we're talking about pedestrians, but our roadways are incredibly unsafe for everybody. If you look at countries that have safer roadways than us. It includes Iran, India. I mean, most third world countries are safer than ours. There are no first world developed countries anywhere near as unsafe as ours across the board. We don't think about safety and how we develop our roads. And what differentiates us is not, in fact, the existence of smartphones. It turns out smartphones exist across the world. And yet in other countries, people don't die as a result of distraction like they do here. It also turns out other countries have alcohol.

21:00And yet people don't die on the roadways as a result of it like they do here. What distinguishes us is not the presence of teenagers or irresponsibility or distraction or humanity. It is the fact that our roadways are designed without safety in mind at all. There have been attempts to address this issue of pedestrian safety. And Ian, your reporting documents how Vision Zero has largely failed in U.S. cities. Just first remind us what is Vision Zero and what are its intended goals? Yeah, I mean, just to kind of step back and address that reader's kind of point head on, like absolutely you see pedestrians making risky decisions, crossing when the traffic isn't stopped or not looking or being drunk.

21:45and what Vision Zero I think kind of has at its core is that that shouldn't be a death sentence, right? Like people are going to do dumb things, they're not always going to make the safest decision and that shouldn't mean that they should be killed as a result and so how do you then design a kind of transportation system that isn't lethal? And a lot of that comes down to speed and giving people the chance to stop or be hit and be injured and not be killed and so Vision Zero is this idea that was sort of imported from Europe that you want to look at everything as a system and see how it all fits together and kind of make the investments that reduce lethality, I guess, is the kind of main goal and then once you can do that, try and eliminate serious injuries too.

22:31Well, you published a story about Cecilia Milbourne and you say it clearly illustrates the problems with this initiative. Who was she and how does her death expose the problems with Vision Zero? Yeah, so Cecilia was a woman. She was on the beach in Los Angeles and she was just trying to get back to her car. And to do that, she had to cross this very busy road that runs along the Pacific Ocean there. And she was hit and killed and thrown down a cliff by this vehicle. I mean, it's a really awful story. but what my colleague Rachel Weiner learned is that this road had been redesigned and changed under Los Angeles Vision Zero initiative.

23:15They had kind of reconfigured the parking, reconfigured the lanes, tried to kind of slow everything down, make it so that it wasn't such a distance that people had to cross when they're visiting this beach. And people in the community were in such uproar about how this changed their driving habits and their commutes and kind of left them stuck in traffic. that the city pulled out all the changes and kind of reverted the road back to how it was. And kind of incredibly, the man who hit Cecilia was one of the people who had complained about the changes to the roads in this area. And so the story kind of encapsulates, and I'm sure Gabe encountered this all the time, that these changes are often pretty controversial, especially with drivers or people who spend a lot of their time driving and that that is an obstacle that local governments have to try and overcome.

24:09Let's take a quick pause here. We'll be back with more of the conversation in just a moment.

24:17Let's get back to the conversation. In Washington, D.C., Vision Zero seems to be a bit more successful than in other places. In 2025, the district recorded more than a 50 % drop in traffic deaths. sets compared to the same point last year. Do we understand why? I think so. I mean, you know, I live here in Washington, D.C. I've seen what the mayor and Sharon, who runs DDOT, and Linda Bailey, who ran Vision Zero, I've seen what they've done. And what they typically do is they look at these high-impact crash areas, and they put in a temporary solution and test it. You'll see plastic bollards put up at an intersection to make the area, they call it daylighting, so that you can actually see, the driver can see where the pedestrians are.

25:04We limit their movements so they don't make harsh right turns and hit people coming out of the crosswalk. Then as that works and the community sees that it works, they come back and make it permanent. So I think DC is actually a great example of these things working, but they're always battling against the distracted drivers and the speeding. And I think one of the things I've learned from traveling around the world and working in this space is that you want organized throughput. People think, I want to get there as fast as possible. So like they hit the gas at the intersection, right, only to stop at the next intersection.

25:42What we really want is signals timed properly, the roads designed properly, so that you might go 17 miles an hour, consistently. You might have more roundabouts where you yield and you go around, but you actually get there faster than the constant stop-start speed, which causes a whole bunch of conflicts and reckless behavior. Well, we got this question from Marvin about roundabouts. They write, I know traffic circles, aka roundabouts, improve safety for motorists, but what are their effects on pedestrian safety? Beth? Well, it depends on how they're designed, like with everything else. We see in D.C.

26:25a lot of traffic circles that could be traditional roundabouts, but then they're over-engineered to make sure the cars move through quickly. That creates more problems. The best place for safety is when everyone is forced to slow down and pay attention to each other. And it's against a lot of instincts, but, you know, if everyone has to share a space, they pay more attention, they look out for each other, and they share it well. Well, let's go back to our voicemail. We got this message from Jackson, who works for a transportation nonprofit in Missouri. Missouri is about to surpass its 2024 pedestrian fatality record, and the situation is not necessarily getting better.