Where walking is a lethal activity

Disney World is safe to traverse on foot. And Celebration is undoubtedly fine, too. But in metropolitan Orlando as a whole, if you like to walk, you should be wary because according to a new report, , the Orlando-Kissimmee area is the nation's most lethal region for pedestrians. 

For the report, Transportation for America examined pedestrian fatalities from 20o0 through 2009 in every US metropolitan area of more than 1 million inhabitants. The conclusion: the Orlando-Kissimmee area performed the worst of all the 52 regions that were studied. 

In the Orlando region, a mere 1.2 percent of employed people walked to work, yet during the 10-year period, 557 pedestrians were killed. By contrast, the safest of the 52 regions — metropolitan Boston — had more than double the number of inhabitants and had more than four times the percentage of people walking to work, yet its pedestrian death count was lower:  483 fatalities over the course of the decade. 

Dangerous by Design assigns each metro area a Pedestrian Danger Index (PDI) rating, based on the percentage of people walking to work and on the number of pedestrians killed per 100,000 people. The Orlando area's PDI was 255.4. The Boston region's was 21.6. 

Other Florida metropolitan areas also turned out to be extremely dangerous for pedestrians. The nation's second-most-hazardous area was Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, with a PDI of 212.7. In that region, there were 3.5 pedestrian fatalities per year per 100,000 people, three times Boston's rate of 1.1 deaths per 100,000.

Third-most-dangerous metropolitan area in the US was Jacksonville, with 2.8 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people and with a PDI of 177.8. Fourth was Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, with 2.9 deaths per 100,000 and a PDI of 167.9. 

After Boston, the safest regions for walking were the Cleveland area, greater New York (which had the highest proportion of people walking to work: 6.1 percent), and Pittsburgh. 

Why so much danger?

The report raised the question of whether the high pedestrian death rates in Florida may have resulted from the state's role as a haven for retirees. But statistics showed that people 65 and over accounted for 22 percent pedestrian deaths in Florida, the same as the average across the US. 

More likely, the report says, a region's pedestrian death rate reflects the nature of its development and its transportation system. "The list of the most dangerous metro areas for walking is striking in that all of the ten metro areas are in the South or West, and have seen rapid growth in recent decades of low-density development, characterized by high-speed urban roads that are particularly hazardous for walking," the report observes.

Clearly, however, people 65 and older lose their lives in pedestrian accidents more often than most other segments of the population. Only one-eighth of the nation's population is 65 or older, yet more than a fifth of America's pedestrian fatalities are concentrated in that age group. 

"The higher fatality rate for older pedestrians," the report says, "can probably be attributed to several factors: 1) older pedestrians are more likely to die than young people in a similar crash; 2) existing pedestrian infrastructure, such as the duration of crosswalk signals, ignores the needs of older walkers; and, 3) older pedestrians are more likely to have physical impairments that decrease their ability to avoid oncoming traffic."

The other age group that suffers a disproportionate loss of life is children. Pedestrian injury is the third leading cause of death by unintentional injury for children 15 and younger, according to mortality data from the federal Centers for Disease Control. Nearly 3,900 children 15 years and younger were killed while walking from 2000 through 2007, representing between 25 and 30 percent of all traffic deaths.

"These numbers are especially high considering that only a fraction of children today walk or bicycle to school, in large part because of their parents’ fears of traffic," the report notes. "When surveyed, parents express concerns about a range of perceived safety hazards: the amount of traffic on roads (71.3 percent), the speed of traffic (69.8 percent), in- adequate or missing sidewalks (48.6 percent) and poor quality or missing crosswalks (39 percent) — all factors influenced by street design."

How fast a motor vehicle is going is a major determinant of whether the pedestrian will be killed. If struck by a vehicle traveling 20 mph, 95 percent of pedestrians will survive. At 30 mph, the survival rate drops to 55 percent. At 40 mph, only 15 percent survive. 

To new urbanists, it will not be surprising that, as the report notes, "most pedestrians are killed on the wider, higher capacity and higher-speed roads called arterials. These roads are called arterials because they connect major destinations within an urban or rural area. More than 52 percent of the 47,067 pedestrians killed (for whom roadway classification data were recorded) over the ten-year period died on principal or minor arterials."

"Many states persist in requiring a minimum of 12-foot lanes on all roadways, though research shows that in urban areas, 12-foot lanes show no safety benefit over 10-foot lanes," the report points out.

"For the nation as a whole, the pedestrian death rate remains stubbornly high and tops most of our international peers by a significant margin," Transportation for America says. "Canada and Australia, both developed countries with a similar infrastructure to the U.S., have pedestrian fatality rates of 1.1 and 0.9 per 100,000, respectively, compared to 1.6 for the U.S."

What to do

Among the report's recommendations:

• Retain dedicated federal funding for the safety of people on foot or on bicycle. Congress is currently contemplating elimination of dedicated funding for Transportation Enhancements and the Safe Routes to School program, the two largest funding sources for bike and pedestrian facilities. Without these committed funding streams, states will likely reduce spending for safety features like sidewalks, crosswalks and trails.

• Adopt a national complete streets policy.

Ensure that all federally funded road projects take into account the needs of all users of the transportation system, including pedestrians, bicyclists and public transporta- tion users, as well as children, older adults, and individuals with disabilities.

• Fill in the gaps. Beyond making new and re- furbished roads safer for pedestrians, we need to create complete networks of sidewalks, bicycle paths and trails so that residents can travel safely throughout an area. To this end, the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy has gathered testimony from 53 communities outlining how they could fill in strategic gaps to make walking and bicyling to routine destinations more safe and convenient with small targeted federal grants.

• Commit a fair share for safety. In 2008, only two states spent any of their Highway Safety funding to improve infrastructure for bicycling and walking. Yet, pedestrians and bicyclists make up 14 percent of all traffic- related fatalities. Federal, state and local governments should set safety goals that not only reduce fatalities overall, but also reduce fatalities for individual modes, with separate safety goals for pedestrians, bicyclists, motorcyclists and motorists.

Pedestrian deaths are mapped on an , as previously noted by , allowing readers to see how their own city is faring.