Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Article Claims Walkers Themselves Could Be To Blame For Increase In Pedestrian Deaths

 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) statistics show that pedestrian deaths have increased in the past several years. In fact, they claim a pedestrian was killed every two hours and injured every eight minutes in traffic crashes.


So what's to blame for the increase in deaths? Is it due to more people walking? An increase in older people with slower reflexes and poorer eye sight driving? More people driving distracted- aka talking or texting on their phones?
TheNHTSA doesn't pretend to know what's causing more pedestrians to be victims in collisions with vehicles, but the Washington Post says it could be due to distracted walking- wearing headphones or using mobile devices while walking or using public transportation. Here's the Washington Post story.

2 comments:

Charles said...

I agree, sometimes I have seen pedestrians walk right into the street in front of a car without even looking either direction, guess since they think they have the right of way they do not have to look.

SRTC Staff said...

Ha! Yeah, right of way. We've seen how well that works in the past. I haven't seen anyone talking or texting walk without looking but I do seem to always get stuck behind someone moving REALLY slow on narrow sidewalks cause they're texting.


About SRTC

SRTC is the federally designated Metropolitan Planning Organization (MPO) for Spokane County. Urbanized areas with populations exceeding 50,000 people are required to have an MPO. SRTC was formed to address the county's transportation planning needs. It provides coordination in planning between the public, cities, small towns, the county, the state, transit providers, and tribes.

SRTC offers services including transportation monitoring, transportation modeling, census information analysis, travel demand forecasting, historical traffic count analysis, geographic information systems, and trip generation rates.