Most of the news about traffic safety has been good in recent decades, as vehicle manufacturers have added safety features, drunken driving deaths have fallen and seat belt use has climbed to nearly 90%. But in recent years, pedestrian and cyclist deaths have been a disturbing outlier. The number of pedestrians killed grew by 3.4% last year, to 6,283, and the number of cyclists rose by 6.3%, to 857, even as total traffic deaths decreased. On average, about 17 pedestrians and two cyclists were killed each day in crashes. Together they accounted for one-fifth of all traffic deaths.
Here’s what the report found.
Urban areas are where the trouble is.
Over the last decade, pedestrian deaths remained nearly the same in rural areas, but rose 69% in urban areas. Cyclist deaths have also risen significantly in urban areas, up 48% over the decade from 2009 to 2018. Those increases far outpace population growth in urban areas, which the Census Bureau estimates at 13% from 2008 to 2017, according to the report.
Though urban motorists might point to the risks created by pedestrians whose attention is glued to their cellphones, a report released in August by the New York City Department of Transportation found that walking and texting was rarely to blame for pedestrian deaths. The study said the use of portable electronic devices by pedestrians was a factor in, at most, only 0.2% of pedestrian traffic deaths nationwide.
More than one-third of traffic fatalities now happen ‘outside the vehicle.’
As cars, trucks and SUVs have been designed to keep those inside them safer, a higher proportion of traffic deaths are happening “outside the vehicle,” a category that includes motorcyclists and their passengers as well as pedestrians and bicyclists. In 1996, such deaths made up 20% of all traffic deaths; by 2018, the proportion had risen to 34%.
Especially notable are the figures for crashes involving large trucks. While overall fatalities in such crashes rose slightly — 0.9% — in 2018, compared with the year before, but the number of pedestrians and cyclists killed by large trucks shot up by 9.7%.
Traffic deaths continue to decline overall.
The number of traffic deaths in the United States has been generally declining for about 40 years. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration attributes the trend largely to two changes in public behavior that it has heavily promoted: more seat belt use and less drunken driving.
The report said that 29% of fatal traffic accidents last year involved a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08% or higher, the smallest proportion since the agency began reporting alcohol data in 1982.
Even so, traffic accidents still take a major toll — killing 36,560 people in 2018, according to the report — and that is especially true among adolescents and young adults.
Americans between the ages of 15 and 24 are more likely to die in a traffic accident than in any other type of accident, including drug overdoses and other poisonings, according to 2017 figures from the Center for Disease Control. (Overdoses and poisonings rank first, and traffic accidents second, for the population as a whole.)
This article originally appeared in
.