An “epidemic” of pedestrian fatalities and injuries is sweeping the United States, hitting people of color, children, and older adults the hardest. According to a new report (pdf), these are not inevitable “accidents,” but rather, preventable tragedies that stem from poor social policies.
Entitled Dangerous By Design 2014, the study was released Tuesday by the National Complete Streets Coalition, a program of Smart Growth America. Stefanie Seskin, Deputy Director of NCSC, told Common Dreams that the deaths and injuries the report catalogs are “social justice” issues. “Right now we are forcing people of color, older adults, and children to bear the epidemic of fatalities,” she said.
Click Here: camisetas de futbol baratas
Between 2003 and 2012, one pedestrian in the U.S. was hit by a car every 8 minutes on average. Of those hit, 47,025 were killed—16 times the number of people killed in natural disasters during the same period—and 676,000 were injured.
Fatality rates for those on foot appear to be growing, the report finds. Pedestrian deaths as a proportion of overall traffic deaths have risen since 2009, and in 2012, pedestrians accounted for almost 15 percent of all traffic fatalities in the country.
Low-income people of color are hit hardest because they are the ones who are least considered in issues of community safety. —Barbara Lott-Holland, LA Bus Riders Union
Where are these lives lost?
Using a “Pedestrian Danger Index”—which divides the average annual fatality rate in a location by the percentage of people who commute to work by foot—the authors determined that the sunbelt region, particularly the south, is by far the most deadly for pedestrians. While the four most dangerous cities are all in Florida, the problem spans the country and is acute in nearly every major urban area. In New York, for example, 32.5 percent of traffic deaths were pedestrians between 2003 and 2012.
The report finds, “The majority of pedestrian deaths occur on arterial roadways, planned and engineered for speeding automobiles with little consideration for the diversity of people—young, old, with and without disabilities, walking and bicycling—who rely on these streets to get them from point A to point B.”
Yet, lives are not lost across all populations equally.
SCROLL TO CONTINUE WITH CONTENT