Pedestrian deaths in car crashes have been on the rise in the US since 2009. While some attribute the deaths to the increase in car sizes, new research from AAA shows most of the added crashes are at night, and particularly on arterial roads.
Stephen Heiney is a research associate at the UNC Highway Safety Research Center in Chapel Hill. He says it’s not just dark nighttime conditions that are proving fatal, but the style of road itself. Heiney said arterials are the problem: "Wider, faster, [roads], what you might see in more outside of city center in suburban areas.”
These roads often have limited sidewalks and crosswalks, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t pedestrians trying to cross to get to amenities. Getting those facilities in place can be a challenge, especially in North Carolina, where NCDOT controls many arterial roads.
The study also found:
- Most pedestrian fatalities occurred well outside of downtown: more than half happened more than 4 miles from the city center.
- Pedestrian crashes resulting in injuries and fatalities disproportionately occurred in socially and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods. These are neighborhoods with older housing and greater diversity of land use. Many who live or work in these neighborhoods rely on walking for daily transportation or access to transit but are forced to walk in poorly lit areas with poor or no sidewalks and long distances between safe places to cross.
"Charlotte was one of our cities we identified in the case study, is really who controls the roadway or who decides design standards can sometimes affect that" he explained. "Where a city may want lower speeds or a different type of roadway, the state may have different ideas.”
It’s one of many ways the existing roadway system can make things more dangerous for pedestrians, in a way that is largely invisible to the average person.
"The crash, it's an 'inconvenience in the morning', when it could be a death on the roadway. It could be something more serious than that. It's sort of become background to this driving to work or the everyday driving that everybody does," he said.
Heiney wants to see traffic deaths treated like a public health issue, with all kinds of government agencies coming together to try to make the world a safer place to navigate by foot. He and his fellow researchers advocate for a Safe System approach, which anticipates human mistakes and reduces crash severity by addressing safety holistically through safer roads, vehicles, speeds, and road users.
But he said that starts with recognizing that traffic fatalities are preventable, and making a concerted effort to change the landscape in ways that make walking and biking safer.
