By Anthony Hennen | The Center Square
(The Center Square) – Pedestrian deaths have crept upward for more than a decade nationally, and Pennsylvania has seen a 21% rise since 2019.
The preliminary numbers for 2021, published by the Governors Highway Safety Association, are significant. While non-pedestrian traffic deaths increased by 13% between 2010 and 2020, pedestrian deaths jumped by 54%.
Nationally, traffic fatalities hit a 16-year high in 2021, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association.
No single reason carries the blame for the rise in deaths. Instead, it’s a range of issues, from larger vehicles that turn an injury into a fatality, to the standards followed by planners and officials, to more people in less-walkable areas like suburbs and exurbs.
“We have focused on the safety of people inside of vehicles to the detriment of people outside of vehicles,” said Steve Davis, associate vice president of transportation strategy for Smart Growth America. “We do not consider the impact of the immense growing size of our vehicles on people that are not in them.”
Consumer preferences play into those issues.
“Big cars (are) certainly a big part of that – it’s not the only part of that,” Davis said. A pickup truck is “way more likely to mow you down rather than pop you up on top of a hood.”
State and federal standards play a major role in making streets more dangerous, too.
“The bigger issue, which is not the magic bullet – the design guidelines that traffic engineers use, and that the people that are making decisions about how to design our streets – we have prioritized moving as many vehicles as possible as quickly as possible as the No. 1 goal,” Davis said.
When speed is the priority, safety will slip away, no matter how much engineers try to correct for it.
“You cannot reconcile these two goals,” Davis said.
Pennsylvania’s 154 pedestrians killed in 2019 was slightly higher than the 146 fatalities in 2020. In 2021 there were 186, according to GHSA data. Additionally, in 2019, another 4,100 pedestrians were injured in crashes and 2,788 in 2020, according to a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation crash report.
Of those deaths, 44% of pedestrians were in a crosswalk at the time of the crash. Most deaths happened in a city (47%), with another 40% in townships. State highways were also the most dangerous places for pedestrians: 74% of fatalities happened on state roadways rather than local ones.
While driver preferences for larger vehicles may be harder to change by legislation, decisions on road design remain in local and state hands. Prioritizing pedestrian safety isn’t always a matter of pitting non-drivers and drivers against each other, either.
“People who drive should be a little more incensed at the situations that we’re putting them into,” Davis said. “We are putting them into situations where they are becoming increasingly likely to strike or injure or kill someone walking just by virtue of the design of a road.”