Increases in Pedestrian & Bike Deaths in NC: A Reminder to Teach Our Kids Road Safety?
It might be a slightly chaotic time to be finishing up residency for an online post-master’s FNP program in North Carolina: emergency doctors in hospitals are on the alert for road injuries, given the recent spike in patients who have been involved in road accidents. With pedestrian fatalities up 20% from 2018 to 2022 in North Carolina, and an average increase of 7% year over year across the US since 2010, road fatalities are a serious problem.
But what’s the solution? This is something experts can’t seem to agree on. Only one this is certain: something about the way we manage human presence on the roads needs to change.
Driver Behavior
“With great power comes great responsibility” – whether you attribute this quote to Voltaire or Uncle Ben, it remains one of the most universally accepted axiomatic moral truths ever expressed by a human (real or fictional). And it can’t be denied that anyone driving a car holds a great amount of power – usually around 100 watt-hours if they’re traveling at roughly 60 mph.
Jokes aside, driving a car is a serious responsibility, and even the slightest mistake can be the difference between life and death for a driver, their passengers, or anyone around them. And with cell phones causing a surge in distracted driving, some focus needs to be placed on improving driver behavior. Indeed, in New Mexico, distracted driving accounts for nearly 40% of all fatal crashes. Clearly, this is a serious issue.
But it’s not the only problem. Drunk driving is and always has been a major source of road fatalities, and North Carolina is one of the worst states for it. To that effect, they are stepping up their annual “Booze it and Lose it” campaign to push back on drunk driving by taking a number of measures, including stepping up alcohol checkpoint presence.
With 162 deaths in July last year – nearly a full half of the state’s 388 drunk driving deaths throughout the entirety of 2023 – the laid-back summertime season is clearly a major factor in encouraging dangerous driving.
And yet, for better or worse, according to the numbers, drunk and distracted driving are not the biggest causes of pedestrian fatalities.
Pedestrian Behavior
While it’s always tempting to blame drivers, given that they’re the ones encased in a 2-ton metal bubble hurtling down the road and often suffer little to no consequences from collisions with pedestrians, the harsh reality is that most pedestrian fatalities are the fault of the pedestrian rather than the driver.
In a recent Florida study, it was found that pedestrians were at fault for 80% of all vehicle-related pedestrian fatalities. The most common source of these collisions was jaywalking, with the most common varieties being walking without the go-ahead from a pedestrian signal, midblock crossing (crossing the road at a point without a pedestrian crosswalk), crossing the street at a crosswalk but walking outside the marked area for crossing, and walking on or along the street with the flow of traffic, ignoring a designated pedestrian pathway (as well as road guidance which advises pedestrians to walk against the flow of traffic where there is no present crosswalk.
This finding is relatively consistent with other broadly comparable studies – and not even just in the US. A study by Monash University in Australia yielded similar results, estimating careless pedestrian behavior to be the statistically greatest contributor to pedestrian road fatalities. And yet another study – done in North Carolina itself – placed pedestrians at fault in 59% of cases.
For this reason, one of the major policy focus points of prevention for pedestrian fatalities has been on public education around road safety for pedestrians. To this end, North Carolina has actually devoted substantial resources to public education, policy, and information campaigns designed to make pedestrians more aware of the dangerous of walking on or near roads, making inappropriate crossings, and other risky forms of pedestrian behavior.
And yet, as convincing as these statistics – especially ones this dramatic – might seem, there is another major element at play that removes some blame from both drivers and pedestrians in these scenarios.
Infrastructure and Vehicles
Many of the loudest voices around road safety for pedestrians point the finger most firmly at the design of the roads and cars involved in these incidents. Statistics demonstrate that accidents involving pedestrians often occur in places where crossings are not conveniently placed or simply too far apart to offer reasonable pedestrian access. Even the Department of Transportation places the creation of infrastructure that is designed around “anticipating human mistakes by designing and managing road infrastructure to keep the risk of a mistake low” as their highest priority for preventing pedestrian deaths. Studies also show that larger vehicles like trucks and SUVs are substantially more likely to cause pedestrian fatalities if they are involved in such accidents, being up to 45% deadlier than smaller cars.
At the end of the day, all of these are issues that seriously affect pedestrian safety. If we are serious about bringing these numbers down, we have to address the problem from all angles. But safer roads and smaller cars would definitely help.
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