Can Anything Be Done About The High Pedestrian Death Toll?

In 2022, more pedestrians died on the road than in any of the preceding 40 years. From 2014 to 2024, pedestrian deaths rose seven times faster than the national population. The national numbers from 2024 look better, buy most of the 2024 decline took place in California. If you take California out, there really isn’t much improvement to be found, reports Governing.

There are a few plausible explanations for the increase in pedestrian deaths over a prolonged period. Roads weren’t so crowded with cars during the pandemic, possibly leading drivers to act more recklessly. Traffic-law enforcement declined, especially after the emphasis on police excesses that followed the George Floyd murder in 2020. Vehicles have gradually gotten bigger; the Governors Highway Safety Association reported that light trucks were involved in 52 percent of pedestrian deaths nationwide.

There are a few plausible explanations for the increase in pedestrian deaths over a prolonged period. Roads weren’t so crowded with cars during the pandemic, possibly leading drivers to act more recklessly. Traffic-law enforcement declined, especially after the emphasis on police excesses that followed the George Floyd murder in 2020. Vehicles have gradually gotten bigger; the Governors Highway Safety Association reported that light trucks were involved in 52 percent of pedestrian deaths nationwide.

In the Washington, D.C., region, between 2015 and 2018, car crashes killed one out of 100,000 residents in the area. By 2024, the rate had doubled. This happened during a drastic reduction in police issuance of speeding tickets: In 2019, more than 10,000 of these tickets were given out to lawless drivers; in 2024, that number had been cut by more than half. There were 15 hit-and-run pedestrian fatalities in D.C. in 2024, according to the Washington Post; no driver was charged .

D.C.'s transportation director, Sharon Kershbaum, argued that most of these deaths had to do with human misconduct, not faulty road design. She said nearly 80 percent of pedestrian deaths “were tied to reckless and anti-social behavior.”

Kershbaum was aligning herself with the nation’s most outspoken student of pedestrian fatalities, Greg Shill, a law professor at the University of Iowa.

Shill argues that pedestrians — and motorists — die on the roads mostly because of driver malfeasance, not badly designed highways. His statistics assert that roughly half of driver deaths occur when the driver fails to wear a seatbelt and that about a third of road fatalities are tied to drunk driving.

What’s needed, Shill believes, is more enforcement — more tickets issued for moving violations, more speed cameras, more crackdowns on red-light running, more vigilance on the part of the authorities in general.

Shill focuses much of his criticism on the highway safety movement, specifically on the Vision Zero traffic control programs that this movement has encouraged localities to implement . Shill disparages the Vision Zero approach as “street design essentialism,” a belief that the nation can design its way out of the thousands of needless fatalities that occur on streets and highways every year.

The reality appears to be that in the suburbs, where most of the pedestrian fatalities take place, there is still a strong backlash against paying for more traffic surveillance and dealing with its regulations. It may be a long time before Shill gets the kind of enforcement he wants. Localities are talking more about the problem, but are proving slow to do much about it.