Despite the clear public health and safety problems presented by pedestrians being hit by cars, pedestrian safety is still neglected in the United States. Little federal spending goes to protect the most vulnerable road users. Most traffic safety programs are aimed at ensuring the safety of motorists, and too often pedestrians are considered at fault in accidents.

Nationwide, 5.4 percent of all trips are made on foot, and 13 percent of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians.  Yet the states spent less than one percent of their federal funds on pedestrian safety.

Providing basic facilities is the first step toward improved pedestrian safety. Building sidewalks, paths and other accommodations is fundamental to providing a safe walking environment. Unfortunately, the states are doing little with their federal dollars to make it safer and easier to walk. Nationwide, 5.4 percent of all trips are made on foot, and 13 percent of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians. Yet federal spending on pedestrian facilities came to less than one percent (0.6 percent) of federal transportation spending in the years studied. On average, the states spent just 55 cents per person of their federal funds on pedestrian projects, compared to 72 dollars per person on highway projects. In California, 21 percent of all traffic fatalities are pedestrians, yet the state reported spending just over four cents per person on bicycle and pedestrian facilities, far below the national average. Table 3 shows how much each state has spent on pedestrian facilities.

Some federal transportation dollars are designated for use on safety projects, but poor reporting by the states to the federal government prevents an accurate assessment of the use of these funds. New language was added to the federal transportation law TEA-21 in 1998 to specifically encourage safety spending on projects that would enhance pedestrian and bicycle safety, but few states have modified their spending criteria to use the funds in this way.

Part of the problem is that pedestrian safety has always been a secondary traffic engineering issue. The overriding goal of traffic engineering has been to improve roadway "level of service" (LOS), so that more vehicles may travel at higher speeds. That often means designing roads with wide lanes and shoulders, large turning radii at intersections, and plenty of passing and turning lanes. Few efforts have focused on ensuring that streets are safe and convenient for all road users, including pedestrians. Even the most fundamental pedestrian safety tool, the walk signal, shows this bias because in most places it allows cars to make right- and left-hand turns across the crosswalk during the walk sequence. Engineering measures to facilitate pedestrian street crossings, such as curb extensions at corners, refuge islands, and raised crosswalks have only recently been introduced in the U.S., years after they became commonplace in Europe.

Pedestrians are often considered at fault in crashes, obscuring the real issue of safe pedestrian facilities. Police reports are often designed to describe vehicle-pedestrian collisions in terms of what the pedestrian did wrong.(1) Seldom do reports of pedestrian fatalities, particularly in the media, record the actions of the driver, describe how fast the car was traveling, or note whether the motorist was paying attention. Yet research has concluded that the fault of pedestrian-vehicle collisions frequently rests with drivers. When investigating child pedestrian injury cases, a recent study found that "drivers leave most of the responsibility for avoiding collisions to the [child] pedestrian."(2) 

The police also may be ignoring illegal driver behavior. A study of police reports from deadly pedestrian crashes in New York City found that in 74 percent of the cases, drivers were speeding, had illegally turned into a crosswalk, had run a stop light, or were otherwise culpable in the death. Yet only sixteen percent of drivers were cited, and less than one percent were cited for violating laws specific to pedestrian safety.(3)

Many pedestrian safety projects are aimed at pedestrians rather than at drivers. Many cities have responded to pedestrian deaths with crackdowns on jaywalking. In some areas, the response to high pedestrian accidents has been to actively discourage walking. In Santa Ana, California, the solution to high death rates was to prohibit pedestrians from using medians as refuges from speeding traffic.(4) Other communities have removed crosswalks or put up signs prohibiting pedestrian crossing. These actions will do little to discourage people who must walk to get where they are going, and may result in more pedestrian deaths and injuries, not less.

Many safety programs for children focus on training them to be extremely cautious in crossing the street. But evaluations of these programs show their effectiveness to be mixed at best, and some studies show children under seven simply do not have the necessary developmental skills to determine when cars are a danger.(5)  More and more health and safety researchers are recognizing that making the environment safer is of crucial importance, especially for children.