Editor's Note: The views and opinions expressed in all blog posts are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Redwood City Pulse or its staff.

It's this time of the year when we might see PSAs and TV ads reminding drivers to do better and buy their spouse an even bigger car with an even bigger bow. Drunk and distracted driving is an excellent danger all around the year, but for pedestrians, apparently more so during the winter holiday season. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) collects its data in a system named Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) – and for this blog post, we will mainly look at pedestrian fatalities between the years 2012 to 2021. Over those years, the worst month for pedestrians seems to be December, followed by November and October. That appears to be related to the fact that a majority of fatalities happen during nighttime and on streets without sidewalks.

In the past, NHTSA and the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) often showed a particular anti-pedestrian bias. Just look at the pedestrian in the video Pedestrians Don't Have Armor. At least eight drivers are breaking all kinds of laws, but OTS makes the law-abiding pedestrian look like an idiot. With this kind of attitude, it's no wonder you find national newspaper articles and social media posts about these NHTSA statistics, where the narrative seems to imply that a majority of pedestrian deaths can be blamed on young, dark-clothed teenagers and young adults getting drunk around the holidays. And while distracted by their cell phones, those social-media-addicted traffic fools keep throwing themselves at these poor, defenseless drivers, basically committing suicide. Which is, of course, a very festive narrative everyone can rally around. Especially since the pedestrians usually can't defend themselves.

Does the data fit this festive holiday narrative?

This would require a deeper dive into the data, but we can certainly do a quick look to see if the numbers comply with this uplifting fairy tale.

The majority of fatalities happen on the largest and fastest of arterial roads and urban roads without sidewalks, which begs the question: how many drunk teenagers have wandered onto major highways, such as I-280 or SR-101, to kill themselves?? So these must have been drivers and passengers that got out of their cars (collisions, broken down cars, good Samaritan, emergency services, road workers, etc.) and were hit by other drivers. Or even more likely, these are people who tried to cross these wide streets where traffic engineers forgot to add safe crossings.

An example of a situation like this was part of our Halloween Story. According to the NTSB and the Professional Driver Handbook, "due care" also applies to dark-clothed, drunk people crossing wide Stroads.

How are we doing locally?

Back to our FARS study. As a percentage of all traffic fatalities, the states of New Jersey, Hawaii, and California are especially bad for pedestrians. Many California cities did not know about Vision Zero in 2012 but are embracing it now … and still, the percentages and the actual number of pedestrian fatalities aren't coming down. In 2012, 653 pedestrian fatalities made up 22% of all 2966 traffic deaths. In 2021, those numbers jumped to 1,108/4,285 (25.9%).
Taking things more local, we can compare two numbers. The number of pedestrian fatalities compared to population and the percentage of pedestrian fatalities compared to all fatalities.

Looking at the number of fatalities per population of 100k and the percentage of pedestrian deaths compared to all fatalities, we see the following data:

  • USA: 2.23 (17%)
  • California: 2.82 (25.9%)
  • San Mateo County: 1.36 (31.3%)
  • San Francisco: 1.84 (48.4%)
  • San Jose: 2.85 (36.8%)
  • Redwood City: 3.67 (75%)

It's not a good look for Redwood City, which claims to be all in on Vision Zero. Local leadership is still thinking way too car-centric. We have plenty of large and fast arterials like ECR, Woodside, Jefferson Ave or Middlefield Rd with few bicycle facilities and few safe crossings. And transportation plans like RWCMoves or WalkBikeThrive left out components for children and seniors. The lack of an independent Bicycle Advisory Committee (BAC) or a solid Safe-Routes-To-School project looking over these million-dollar plans hurts this car-centric city and its residents greatly.

Who's To Blame for Pedestrian Deaths?

And talking about car-centric – even Automoblog knows: "In one sense, municipalities themselves bear responsibility for the uptick in deaths. Cities across the US have data about where people are dying and why people are dying, but then not doing anything about it."
(someone must have told them about Redwood City's Great Grand Boulevard story)

Automoblog also has a more technical view: "There's shared blame for the massive spike in pedestrian mortality rates. While it's easy to point fingers at government officials for lax laws or at automakers for building oversized vehicles, the actual cause of rising pedestrian fatalities may be more nuanced. Everyday Americans aren't blameless either, showing that there are multiple layers to the root cause of pedestrian deaths."

And then Automoblog finishes with a more philosophical view: "What the issue really comes down to, however, is whether the public has the appetite to inconvenience themselves on the road to save pedestrians' lives. We have to shift our culture as a country to actually caring what happens to the people around us."

So be good, for goodness sake!

 

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