NPR

Why Pedestrian Deaths Are At A 30-Year High

"It's great advice to tell people to use a crosswalk, but that's not very useful if the crosswalk doesn't exist," says Tom Ellington of the Pedestrian Safety Review Board in Macon, Ga.
A woman speaks on her phone while driving. Both drivers and walkers use cell data 4,000 percent more than they did in 2008, which means they aren't watching the roads.

Across the U.S., 6,227 pedestrians died in traffic accidents in 2018, the highest number in nearly 30 years. The findings from a Governors Highway Safety Association report show that many of these deaths occurred in big cities like Houston and Miami.

The signs are all over most cities — stretches of road without crosswalks and people needing to walk on roads built for rush-hour traffic. But the real increase, experts say, comes from larger trends: drivers and pedestrians distracted by their phones and a growth of larger

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