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The surprising reason why pedestrian deaths are down in the US

And why walking is still so dangerous here.

There are many ways you could measure the health of a city — its air quality index, its population growth, the number of jobs it added last year. My favorite is one not often high on the priority lists of city governments in the US: How safe is it to walk?

The US has the grievous distinction among peer countries as being one of the most dangerous places in the developed world for walking down the street. American pedestrians are killed by cars at three times the rate of Canadians, four times the rate of Brits and Australians, and more than 13 times the rate of Norwegians.

Last month, we finally got a bit of good news about pedestrian safety in America: About 11 percent fewer pedestrians were killed in the first half of 2025 — an estimated 3,024 people total — compared to the same period the previous year, according to a preliminary report published by the Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA). That striking drop tracks a broader decline in total US car crash deaths last year.

Any number of lives saved is worth celebrating, of course, but this is a case where a positive data point occludes a grimmer story. Road fatalities are likely only falling so steeply because just a few years ago, the US saw a rapid, pandemic-era rise in the number of people killed by cars. In 2021, 7,470 pedestrians were killed in crashes, up from 6,565 in 2020 and 6,272 in 2019. We’re now climbing down from that unusually deadly period, but pedestrian deaths in the first half of 2025, GHSA reports, are still higher than they were in similar periods pre-Covid.

The ubiquitous killing of pedestrians on American streets preoccupies me like almost nothing else, but “pedestrian” strikes me as a uniquely terrible term (unless I’m using it to insult someone). Adam Snider, director of communications for GHSA, who talks about pedestrian deaths among other road safety issues for a living, hates the word, too. “We are all pedestrians,” he recently wrote. “The moment you step out of your car, off the bus, or out your front door — you’re one too” (inclusive, of course, of people who get around in wheelchairs, children in strollers, and others). Our ability and need to walk is one of our deepest human inheritances, Rebecca Solnit wrote in her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking. It is, she wrote, “the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart.” And getting killed in that most vulnerable, most human state is “visceral, it’s sudden, it’s violent,” Snider told me. “It’s an awful way to die.”

America’s car crash epidemic

For all those reasons, although all car crash deaths are preventable tragedies, the US transportation system’s endangerment of pedestrians strikes me as uniquely obscene. Pedestrian fatalities may not be at the top of the list of causes of death in the US, but they punch above their weight in significance because they are an indicator of deeper problems in American quality of life that set us apart from peer countries that are far less wealthy.

Our weird hostility to walking is an assault on human dignity. Americans would all be better off if our built........

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