But we don\u2019t talk nearly as much about pedestrian behavior \u2014 and one in six of those traffic deaths is a pedestrian.<\/p>\n
The behavior I’ve witnessed just in the past week:<\/p>\n
- \n
- I was leaving a parking lot at night, waiting to turn left onto a four-lane street. Just as a break in traffic opened up, a gray-haired woman in her 60s or 70s emerged from the darkness and inexplicably decided to run, literally run, in front of <\/em>the car. She was wearing a black coat. At least she was fast: Two seconds slower and we’d both have had a bad evening.<\/li>\n
- There\u2019s a young man who walks up and down the steep hill into my neighborhood at night. He’s there often, so I\u2019m on the lookout for him. The road is narrow, has switchbacks and guardrails, no streetlights, and a ditch but no shoulder. He wears dark clothes, always with a hood pulled over his head. As cars approach, he steps up the muddy embankment to avoid them.<\/li>\n
- On literally the bright side, a family in the neighborhood takes regular nighttime strolls. Four of them, all in reflective vests. Their togetherness is cute, and they give off an impressive glow.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
Pedestrian fatalities have been trending upward a long time \u2014 since 2009<\/a>. Pedestrian fatalities in 2021 were up 13%<\/a> over the year before, outpacing the 10.5% overall increase in traffic fatalities. Pedestrian deaths last year (7,432 souls) surpassed motorcyclist deaths (6,101), and to a surprising degree, bicyclist deaths (985).<\/p>\n
Three-quarters of pedestrian deaths occur<\/a> in a location other than an intersection \u2013 where a driver is at higher speeds and would least expect to encounter someone walking. Similarly, three-quarters of fatal accidents occur at night. In 32% of fatal crashes, the pedestrian had a blood-alcohol level exceeding 0.08%<\/a> \u2014 too impaired to drive, or to make coherent decisions on foot, evidently. In 10% of pedestrian fatalities, the driver was drunk.<\/p>\n
People cross streets while staring at phones, or wearing earbuds, or otherwise distracted. You may have seen our post a couple of months back showing this scary near-miss in a California crosswalk<\/a>. The driver in the video is likely to blame in the eyes of the law for blowing through the intersection \u2013 but that\u2019s not to say the distracted father herding the kids is blameless.\u00a0<\/p>\n
It may be a cultural thing here in the Pacific Northwest where people are indirect in their dealings with each other, but pedestrians entering a crosswalk here often don\u2019t make eye contact with drivers. (How are pedestrians where you live? Let us know in the comments.) It\u2019s as if they themselves have never driven a car. They\u2019ll just step on out, expecting cars will stop.<\/p>\n
Sure, a pedestrian has right-of-way. But if you\u2019re a pedestrian who\u2019s dead, it\u2019s a pyrrhic victory.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/o.aolcdn.com\/images\/dims3\/GLOB\/legacy_thumbnail\/800x1000\/format\/jpg\/quality\/85\/https:\/\/s.aolcdn.com\/os\/ab\/_cms\/2022\/12\/16110450\/Flag-bucket.jpg\")
<\/strong><\/h3>\nFlag on the play<\/strong><\/h3>\n
Downtown Kirkland, Wash., is lined with shops and restaurants where two arterials intersect. It\u2019s filled with crosswalks along the lakeshore and, particularly in summer, foot traffic. After a couple of fatalities in the early 1990s, the city set up a simple system \u2014 dispensers containing brightly colored flags<\/a> pedestrians can carry in a crosswalk to increase visibility. You may have seen these in other towns. They\u2019re now installed at 90 crosswalks throughout Kirkland.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve lived in or near Kirkland for decades, and I love the flags. They\u2019re a simple, low-cost, voluntary public safety solution. (Their only downside: People swipe the flags. Who knows why.) Kids are taught in school to use the flags, and it\u2019s always fun to watch them enthusiastically waving the things in a crosswalk. A Norman Rockwell moment.<\/p>\n
But what\u2019s puzzling is how many adults don\u2019t bother to grab a flag (as in the photo up top). In an attempt to quantify that, I headed downtown one afternoon to lurk by crosswalks, and the results were shocking: More than 100 pedestrians crossed without grabbing a flag. There were a half-dozen jaywalkers. Nobody was on their phone, but few were making eye contact with drivers. Mostly their eyes were downcast \u2013 ah, that Christmas spirit.<\/p>\n
The flag dispensers used to have signs (shown in this photo from the EPA) that tallied how many accidents had occurred without flags (many) vs. when the flags were in use (zero). An employee in the city\u2019s engineering department told me it had been years since they compiled fresh data, so the signs came down. Too bad, they made a compelling argument. But it\u2019s a no-brainer: More visibility means less risk.<\/p>\n
This commentary on Bloomberg<\/a> a few years ago from someone who lives in New York was critical of the flag programs in little old Kirkland and elsewhere, saying a flag “only increases the sense that being a person on foot is somehow weird or embarrassing.”\u00a0Really? People don\u2019t use the flags because they don’t want to look weird or embarrassed? You’d feel a lot more embarrassed getting run over.<\/p>\n
Changes are coming<\/strong><\/h3>\n
If a simple flag on a stick is too horrible to contemplate, then maybe you’d like to rely on complex engineered solutions instead. You\u2019re probably already aware that tall pickups and SUVs have made it harder for a driver to see<\/a> pedestrians. it\u2019s why Sen. Richard Blumenthal is spearheading a call for forward-facing cameras<\/a>; why automakers have developed pedestrian crash avoidance systems<\/a>; and why the insurance industry now tests the new tech\u2019s efficacy<\/a>. And late-model vehicles have thick A-pillars, a safety enhancement in a rollover but a big blind spot. (Toyota<\/a> and JLR were working on \u201csee-through\u201d A-pillars<\/a> years ago; that\u2019s tech we\u2019d love to see \u2026 or not see.)<\/p>\n
These visibility limitations are among the reasons the safety flags are so helpful to drivers.<\/p>\n
Hoboken, N.J., was highlighted on National Public Radio<\/a> awhile back for increasing pedestrian safety \u2013 for example, using bollards to block parking near the margins of a crosswalk and improve sight lines. Hoboken, Kirkland, and other cities nationwide are creating roadway changes in accordance with the Vision Zero Network<\/a> and the Safe System approach<\/a> being implemented by the U.S. Department of Transportation as part of the Biden administration\u2019s infrastructure package. These programs are modeled on successful safety programs in Sweden and the Netherlands. The \u201czero\u201d in Vision Zero stands for zero traffic deaths, and Hoboken hasn\u2019t had any in four years.<\/p>\n
One tenet of these programs is to build infrastructure that better separates road users and makes allowances for human error \u2013 if you make a mistake, it doesn\u2019t have to be fatal. But implementing them will take years, and meanwhile mistakes can be deadly. So, to review what we learned as children:<\/p>\n