New Orleans       If things weren’t already bad enough for low-and-moderate income families and their communities, it turns out an extensive study of pedestrian deaths in the United States finds more will die on streets and thoroughfares going through their neighborhoods than anywhere else.  The Washington Post reports that

City by city across the United States, the surge — from 4,302 in 2010 to 7,314 deaths in 2023 — largely occurred on roads with a few things in common. They were concentrated on multilane roads, with the largest clusters of deaths occurring on thoroughfares that cut through economically distressed neighborhoods and had fading commercial strips… Wide roads and fast-moving vehicles — especially when combined with signs of poverty, homelessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and a lack of pedestrian-focused roadway improvements — produced a pattern of death-by-vehicle that is uniquely American.

This is a dark hole.  Reading the report is almost a form of doom-scrolling.  The story goes on to say,

…more than 3,800 people were killed almost immediately when they were struck in 2023, an indication that high speeds and larger vehicles are making impacts more violent. The rate at which pedestrians are declared dead at the scene of the crash has more than doubled.

While the rest of the developed world has reduced pedestrian deaths by 30% in the period ending in 2023, the US was rolling over people going the other way.  There had been some limited amounts of money under the Biden administration to improve pedestrian safety, the Department of Transportation under Trump has clawed back that money, arguing that they were “hostile to motor vehicles.”  It seems cars are more important than people, especially lower income people.

It was scary to read some of the streets, like Central Avenue in Albuquerque or Westheimer in Houston and Hillsborough Avenue in Tampa, all of which I have driven and found myself need to cross over the years.  Memphis was the worst.  The beautiful wide streets there have been turned into killing lanes, as cars speed up and people try to cross in a deadly game of chicken trying to get to the other side.  As they report,

The national data shows how the design of such roads is closely linked to the fatality rate: Those with three lanes or more are by far the most dangerous, because they enable higher speeds. Above 30 mph, fatality risk increases sharply. At 50 mph, someone’s chance of survival when struck is less than 1 in 5.

Are our low-and-moderate income neighborhoods being targeted?  No one is saying that explicitly, but the impact is the same.

Pedestrian fatalities are more common in more heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods and those with higher poverty rates. Black pedestrians died at a rate double that of Whites, while for Native Americans the rate was more than five times as high. For many people living in the pedestrian death zones identified by The Post, walking is a matter of necessity. On average, nearly a fifth of households in surrounding neighborhoods don’t have access to a car — more than double the rate in other communities — according to a comparison of crash data and Census Bureau records.

It is hard to escape this conclusion, because the solutions to these fatalities are so obvious.  Different road designs.  More crosswalks and traffic lights to slow down the scofflaws.  Actual police protection on the roads or automatic cameras with remote ticketing and license pulls.  Speed bumps and zebra crossings would help.

Pedestrian killings in our neighborhoods could easily be stopped, but first city and other public officials would have to actually care about the fact that lower income people are being killed on them.