(Bloomberg Opinion) -- The U.S. Department of Transportation has published its most recent data on fatal motor vehicle crashes. In 2018, 36,560 people were killed in crashes, down 2.4% from 2017, which was in turn down 0.9% from 2016. According to the department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, fatalities fell in every segment except for large trucks and “nonoccupant fatalities” — pedestrians and cyclists. I’ve written about the alarming increase in pedestrian fatalities due to bigger, higher cars and autonomous-vehicle tests. Thanks to more data from NHTSA, there’s another factor worth exploring: geography.
According to another NHTSA analysis, the 29 biggest U.S. metropolitan statistical areas have the highest absolute numbers of pedestrian fatalities. This isn’t much of a finding, really: These cities are also the biggest population centers, and they have both more traffic and more pedestrians. But one metro area sticks out: Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach.
The four metropolitan statistical areas with the greatest relative increase in pedestrian fatalities from 2014 to 2018 were all in the Southeast. Pedestrian fatalities increased 200% in Austin, Texas; 81% in Charlotte, North Carolina; 64% in Memphis, Tennessee; and 63% in Atlanta.
NHTSA also provides data on the fatality rate per 100,000 people in each metropolitan statistical area. There’s an inverse correlation between a high fatality rate and low population density. Memphis, with the highest pedestrian fatality rate, is next to last in population density.
Miami is an interesting case: It is the fourth-most-dense urban area but the third-deadliest for pedestrians.
Order the data by population density, and we see the same inverse pattern: The more dense the city, the safer it is for pedestrians (on a percentage-of-population basis). Six of the 10 most dense cities are in the top 10 safest cities for pedestrians. Again, Miami jumps out as being both dense and quite unsafe. The Miami metro area has about two-thirds the density of San Francisco-Oakland, but it’s three times deadlier for pedestrians.
NHTSA’s data suggest something perhaps counterintuitive: If you want to live somewhere safe for pedestrians, choose a dense city. It also suggests that our Sun Belt cities, built around the automobile, aren’t designed for pedestrians at all. The trend of fatalities could worsen as more people take to walking and cycling where they previously had not.
The first fatality from autonomous vehicle testing was in Tempe, Arizona, part of the Phoenix metropolitan statistical area — the eighth-deadliest metro for pedestrians. Elaine Herzberg was struck and killed at night, crossing a road outside a crosswalk. Autonomous technology will improve, but if we really want to stop pedestrian fatalities, then our cities need to accommodate and welcome more people on foot, too.
Weekend reading
- India’s carbon dioxide emissions are on track for their lowest rate of increase since 2001, according to a CarbonBrief analysis.
- Seventy-nine percent of the European Union’s coal-fired power generators operate at a loss, and could lose 6.6 billion euros this year, according to Carbon Tracker.
- Environmental Defense’s second annual Business and the Fourth Wave of Environmentalism report finds a 33-point gap between business leaders’ intentions on sustainability and their investment in it.
- Japanese Environment Minister Shinjiro Koizumi’s “sexy” fight against climate change has been declared “untranslatable.”
- Stripe, the second-most-valuable startup in the U.S., is moving out of San Francisco. Meanwhile, the city’s office construction fees could more than double. As investor Kim-Mai Cutler says, “Shot. Chaser.”
- Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says that Google’s quantum computing project has achieved “quantum supremacy.” Its research has been published in Nature, and MIT Technology Review has an exclusive interview with Pichai.
- Design firm Frog Design Inc. has created a prototype of a low-cost virtual reality headset and game experience optimized for mostly immobile burn-wound patients.
- The Potomac River’s World War I ghost fleet.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Brooke Sample at bsample1@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Nathaniel Bullard is a BloombergNEF energy analyst, covering technology and business model innovation and system-wide resource transitions.
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