SLIDESHOW: The Two Factors Driving U.S. Pedestrian Fatalities
Last year 32 people were killed in Delaware for this “crime”:
they were walking
in the wrong place
at the wrong time
Very few of those deaths received any coverage in any Delaware media in 2019 beyond a short article with a few sentences paraphrasing a police report. So those 32 shattered families grieved in silence while the rest of the world took little note.
The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has designated October of 2020 as the first-ever National Pedestrian Safety Month. Unfortunately, while this will allow NHTSA to issue press releases that convey the impression to the public that it’s hard at work solving America’s catastrophic pedestrian safety crisis (over 6,000 people killed in 2019 – a 30 year high), the brutal reality is that effective responses are widely crippled in the U.S. by a profound lack of understanding about the underlying causes of fatal pedestrian crashes. Indeed, “National Pedestrian Safety Month” will feature weeks of advertising that will in the end amount to little more than spending millions of taxpayer dollars on systematic victim blaming.
To get beyond that deeply pernicious victim blaming and get behind real solutions, we need to understand the real causes. Bike Delaware recently analyzed ten years of national data on fatal pedestrian crashes (which Smart Growth America kindly shared with us) in order to do just that. To make that analysis easily understandable, we created the slideshow below. Please take a look:
