Texas 10th-deadliest state for pedestrians

Street design to blame?

Steve Hawley, Mar 03, 10.

Texas is the tenth-deadliest state for pedestrians, with 1.71 fatalities per 100,000 residents in 2008, according to USA Today. Texas ranked third in total pedestrian fatalities with 416, behind California and Florida.

Florida was the deadliest state in the country, with 2.67 pedestrian fatalities per 100,000 population. Eleven of the 13 deadliest states are in the Sun Belt, with its population boom and sprawling, car-dependent cities. The least deadly states were Vermont, Nebraska, Alaska, Minnesota, and New Hampshire. Vermont had just one pedestrian fatality in 2008, or 0.16 fatalities per 100,000 population.

A recent Transportation for America report said that Houston is the eighth-deadliest city in the country for pedestrians. According to Transportation for America and other advocacy groups, poor street design is to blame for many of the deaths. Streets in the Sun Belt tend to have wide, high-speed roads that do not take pedestrian safety into account. “It’s an expense that doesn’t have to do with transportation,” said Mark Seegers, a spokesman for Harris County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia, in a recent Houston Chronicle interview. “The county does not do sidewalks; it’s not what gets cars from point A to point B.” The Dallas Morning News blamed poor street design for the recent deaths of three teenage girls who were trying to cross a highway near Dallas.

In Florida, pedestrian and bicycle advocates say that pedestrian safety is an afterthought in the developer-led planning process, and that the state does little to educate drivers and pedestrians about safety.

However, others say that street design has nothing to do with pedestrian fatalities. Marianne Trussell, the chief safety officer of the Florida Department of Transportation, told USA Today, “There are so many factors involved and most of them are random. We’re trying to figure out root causes and how we can fix it.”

However, recent efforts to improve pedestrian safety in St. Petersburg strongly suggest that street design plays a large part in pedestrian fatalities. USA Today reports:

In 2000, the Surface Transportation Policy Partnership identified Tampa-St. Petersburg as the nation’s deadliest large metropolitan area for pedestrians. That year in St. Petersburg, there were 203 collisions involving pedestrians. The city’s new mayor, Rick Baker, decided to do something about it, says Michael Frederick, the city’s manager of neighborhood transportation.

The city put together a plan that included building bike lanes and trails, improving pedestrian safety through crosswalks and other enhancements, education, enforcement and building sidewalks on major roads.

Since 2003, the city has received more than $40 million in federal grants, built 100 miles of bike lanes and trails and added sidewalks. It also pioneered a more visible traffic signal, a rectangular-shaped, flashing beacon like lights on emergency vehicles. Installed at 32 crosswalks for $20,000 apiece, the signals have raised driver compliance at those crosswalks from 3% to 86%, Frederick says.

In 2008, the latest year for full data, there were 89 collisions involving pedestrians — down 56% from 2000.