Pedestrian deaths have reached the highest level in 28 years, largely because of the nation’s appetite for fast arterial roads in urban-suburban areas and the ubiquitous SUVs that rule them, an insurance research group has found.
Nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in 2016, up 46 percent from 2009, when such deaths were at a low point, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) said in a report issued Tuesday. That’s the most pedestrian deaths since 1990, and at a much faster rate than for overall traffic fatalities, which rose 11 percent over the same period.
The pedestrian deaths occurred mostly when it was dark and mostly on roads designed to funnel urban or suburban traffic onto freeways, the institute says. The crashes generally occur where there are no intersections or poorly designed crosswalks that tempt pedestrians to dash across multiple lanes of swiftly moving vehicles. The crashes often involved SUVs or vehicles with a lot of horsepower, which suggests that many of the crashes also involved excess speed.
“This analysis tells us that improvements in road design, vehicle design and lighting and speed limit enforcement all have a role to play in addressing the issue,” IIHS President David Harkey said in a statement.
