Pedestrian Deaths Are An Emergency. We Need To Start Acting Like It

In 2022, cars killed 7,508 pedestrians, the equivalent of 18 fully-loaded Boeing 747s crashing with zero survivors. That means a pedestrian died roughly every 70 minutes, with no breaks in the tide of fatalities for weekends or holidays. This flood of death is recent: American roads were demonstrably safer to walk on just a decade ago, with thousands fewer pedestrian deaths. 

Experts are unanimous in their assessment of the situation: this is a disaster. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has called the surge of deaths “a national crisis on our roadways”. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has undertaken a number of studies to determine why fatalities are rising, and has added stricter testing guidelines for pedestrian-monitoring systems. But as automakers have developed new technology to address increasing fatalities, the question remains: why are we caught in a death spiral? 

Pedestrian deaths trended slightly downward in the first half of 2023 (data for the whole year is not yet available), but even a partial count indicates thousands more fatalities than our country’s all-time low in 2010, when 4,302 were killed. Fatalities aren’t up just in unadjusted, raw deaths, either; the massive jump in pedestrian fatalities during and after Covid has driven a rise in deaths per vehicle-mile traveled and deaths per capita, as well.

What’s driving the increase? There’s no single factor. High-risk behavior has driven some of the climb. The pandemic fueled a surge in deaths of despair—fatalities caused by alcohol-induced liver disease, drug overdose, or suicide—that also manifested in higher rates of impaired driving and thousands more deaths. This has fueled part of the increase, with drunk drivers (BAC > .08) causing 19% of pedestrian deaths in 2022, vs. just 16% in 2016.

Speed is also a large component in how likely an impact is to be fatal. Just 12% of pedestrians struck at 25 MPH die, but 45% of those struck at 40 MPH die. This trend is essentially logarithmic: at 58 MPH, 90% of pedestrian impacts are fatal. Unfortunately, speeds are also trending upward in post-COVID America, with some studies showing drivers are over 50% more likely to speed (by at