And walking is far more dangerous than driving or flying, per mile traveled. The fatality rate per 100 million miles traveled was 1.4 deaths among automobile users, and 0.16 deaths among people aboard airplanes. But almost 50 pedestrians died for every 100 million miles walked in 1997. This means that for each mile traveled, walking is 36 times more dangerous than driving, and over 300 times more dangerous than flying.

Some places in the United States are more deadly for pedestrians than others. To measure that danger, we ranked the country’s largest metro areas, taking into account both the rate of pedestrian deaths as measured by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and the amount of pedestrian activity in the community as measured by the U.S. Census Bureau. For this study we used the average number of deaths during 1997 and 1998 (the years for which most recent localized data are available) to even out unusually safe or deadly years and present an accurate picture.

By dividing the number of fatalities in a given metro area by a measure of how much walking is occurring in that area, we arrive at a "Pedestrian Danger Index," which allows us to compare the risk faced by the average walker in different metro areas.(2) The resulting ranking shows that among large metro areas in 1997 and 1998, Tampa was the most dangerous for pedestrians, followed by Atlanta, Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville, Phoenix, West Palm Beach, Memphis, Dallas, and New Orleans. (See Table 1, page 10.)

These results show that walking tends to be most dangerous in newer Southern and Western metro areas. Most of these places have been built-up since the 1950s and are dominated by subdivisions, office parks, and high-speed roads that are designed for fast automobile travel. This means that pedestrians may be forced to walk alongside high-speed roads without any sidewalks, and often must contend with crossing wide, busy streets with no median and few safe crossing- points. Intersections are often designed with wide, sweeping curves that allow cars to keep moving at high speed, but increase the crossing distance and danger for pedestrians. Zoning codes typically require businesses to be fronted by a large parking lot, forcing pedestrians to thread their way through a maze of parked cars to reach their destination.

In such sprawling environments, the combination of wide roads without pedestrian facilities and high-speed traffic can prove deadly. The national data show that walking is most dangerous in places without a basic network of pedestrian facilities – in other words, sidewalks and crosswalks. In many areas developed for automobiles, intersections with crosswalks may be as much as a half-mile apart, leaving pedestrians little choice but to cross these wide streets unprotected. Of the deaths for which location information was recorded, 59 percent occurred in places where pedestrians had no access to a crosswalk. While jaywalking is often given as a cause of pedestrian accidents, less than 20 percent of these fatalities occurred where a pedestrian was crossing outside of an available crosswalk.

Figure 1. Where Pedestrians Are Killed

Speed is also a major factor in whether a pedestrian accident proves to be fatal. A ten-mile per hour increase in speed, from 20 mph to 30 mph, increases the risk of death for a pedestrian in a collision nine-fold. If a car going 20 mph hits a person, there is a 95 percent chance that the person will survive. If that same car is traveling 30 mph, the person has slightly better than a 50/50 chance of survival. At 40 mph, the picture is bleaker still – only fifteen percent of people struck at this speed can be expected to survive.(3)

Unfortunately, for many years traffic engineers failed to address these problems. Although painted crosswalks and walk signals can help, they do little to improve pedestrian safety when placed in a haphazard fashion or spaced too far apart. One respected safety expert has described the kind of ad-hoc placement of pedestrian facilities as being like "trying to mend a severely broken leg using only a small bandage."(4) In many cases this is a byproduct of the attitudes toward traffic safety in the minds of many traffic engineers. They see their top priority as making roads safer to drive at higher and higher speeds, with little consideration of the effect this might have on those not driving – pedestrians, bicyclists, neighbors, children and others. In pursuit of these goals, lanes are widened, curves are straightened, and traffic signals are re-timed, all to accommodate the journey by car. Unfortunately, each of these actions makes the roadway less safe for pedestrians.

Children deserve particular attention when considering pedestrian safety, (Table 2) because they rely more heavily than adults on walking to get where they need to go. In 1997 - 1998, sixteen percent of pedestrian deaths were people under 18 years old. Challenging street crossings that involve high speeds and many lanes of traffic can be particularly hard for young children.

For children, the states with the highest death rate(5) were South Carolina, Mississippi, Utah, North Carolina, Alabama, Arizona, Florida, Alaska, and Louisiana. Most of these states are in the South and West, where automobile-centered development has been the strongest.

In addition, elderly people face a higher risk of death as pedestrians. Twenty-two percent of all pedestrians killed were over 65, even though only 13 percent of the population is elderly. Many pedestrian facilities, particularly walk signals, are timed for use by young adults in good health, and don’t give elderly people enough time to cross in safety.

Some ethnic groups may also be at higher risk. While national statistics are not available, several local studies point to a problem. An STPP study of California pedestrian safety found that a high proportion of pedestrian deaths and injuries in those under 20 years old were young Latinos or African Americans. In 1996, Latino children represented 38.5 percent of the total population of children in California, but they were involved in 47.9 percent of all child pedestrian incidents (fatalities and injuries). In 1996, African American children comprised 7.8 percent of the total population of children in California, but were involved in 14.2 percent of all child-related pedestrian incidents.(6) The Latino Issues Forum attributed the discrepancy to the higher level of walking among Latinos, even though they often live and go to school in areas where walking is difficult and dangerous.(7) The Centers for Disease Control reported recently that in Atlanta, Latinos had pedestrian fatality rates six times that of whites.(8) Latino groups in Atlanta are pushing for better pedestrian facilities along a major seven-lane road where many pedestrians have died.(9) A survey in suburban Washington, DC also found that Latinos were disproportionately represented in pedestrian deaths.(10)

The deadly environment for pedestrians in the United States is not just an inevitable consequence of modern life. Pedestrian fatality rates in the United States are far higher than in other industrialized countries. A recent study compared pedestrian fatalities in terms of the total distance walked. In both Germany and the Netherlands the rate was 26 deaths per billion kilometers walked, while in the United States the rate was 364 deaths per billion kilometers walked — or fourteen times greater.(11) This indicates that much more can be done to make walking safer.

The absolute number of pedestrian deaths has dropped slightly, part of an overall decline in traffic deaths. However, the decline in deaths among pedestrians tells a different story than the decline in deaths among motorists. For motorists, deaths are falling as driving increases, while for pedestrians, deaths are falling as walking decreases. In other words, it looks as if driving is getting safer per mile while walking is not.

There are several possible explanations for this, including the increasingly sprawling and pedestrian unfriendly nature of much new development, and the disproportionately low expenditure of federal transportation funds on projects that lessen the risks to pedestrians. These topics will be explored in greater detail in Chapter Three. And as the next chapter demonstrates, the trend toward less walking has effects on human health that reach beyond death and injury rates.