The 22 year-old man crossed a very wide Avenue, with no pedestrian crossing at this intersection of 49th Street. Except for his family and his friends, he has become a statistic:
Transportation for America’s new report, “Dangerous by Design, How the U.S. Builds Roads That Kill Pedestrians” indicates that of the 40,037 pedestrian fatalities in the USA for which the location of the collision was known, more than 40 percent were killed where no crosswalk was available and more than 52 percent of pedestrian deaths happen on arterial roads designed to accommodate many cars on many lanes at high speeds, with little to no accommodation for people on foot. Those roads often lack sidewalks, crosswalks, and medians for safe pedestrian crossings. “All too often, the consequences of this lack of basic infrastructure are fatal,” the authors of the report note.
The community has long complained of the hazardous conditions encountered when one tries to reach our only park, the Hudson River Park: lack of crosswalks, too short a time to cross for seniors and children.
Transportation for America’s new report highlights that these deaths could have been prevented with better street design. But despite the fact that pedestrians account for 12 percent of all road fatalities, pedestrian safety only gets 1.5 percent of safety funding.
Seniors are nearly twice as likely to be killed while walking as people under 65, the report goes on to say. Older people can’t run across seven lanes of traffic in the time allowed by the crosswalk signal. Nearly two-thirds of transportation planners and engineers said in a survey that they do not consider the needs of older Americans in their planning.
thank you to Streetsblog for their excellent analysis.
Streetsblog Capitol Hill » Dangerous By Design: How the U.S. Builds Roads That Kill Pedestrians.