Pedestrian Death

In a new study published in Sustainability, mobility researchers Ralph Buehler and John Pucher took on the daunting task of standardizing a messy range of global data on walking trips to better see how the United States stacks up against its peer nations. And we stink.

The swelling size of the average car on the road is threatening the environmental potential of EVs more than proponents may realize, a prominent watchdog group warns.

Washington D.C. has failed to bring down road fatalities because its Vision Zero program is hampered by limited infrastructure improvements, low funding and inconsistent oversight, part one of a new report reveals.

Communities that were red-lined in the 1930s are still experiencing more than twice the rate of pedestrian deaths today than more privileged neighborhoods — and we can't achieve Vision Zero until we reckon with racist and classist policies that contribute to the disparity, a groundbreaking new study argues.

Simply taking away the licenses of older drivers who show signs of dementia without addressing the dangers of the car-dependent communities in which they live may not deliver as many safety benefits as policymakers hope, a new study suggests — and it may spike the number of death among seniors who walk and bike, too.

Pedestrian deaths are continuing to skyrocket as the pandemic drags on — and since 2019, analysts say the death rate for walkers has eclipsed the rate of population growth by a factor of at least nine. According to the latest fatality estimates from the Governor's Highway Safety Association, U.S. drivers killed 3,434 people on foot in the first six months of 2022, an increase of five percent over the same period the prior year — and a staggering 18 percent increase over the number of walkers who died in early 2019, the last year before the pandemic.  The group also pointed out that those numbers can't easily be explained by non-traffic-related factors, noting that since "2019, the last pre-pandemic year, pedestrian fatalities have surged 18 percent in just three years – nine times faster than U.S. population growth."