Illinois Pedestrian Deaths Increased Again In 1st Half Of 2021

ILLINOIS — Pedestrian fatalities are spiking nationwide, and continue to increase in Illinois, according to a report released this week showing the number of pedestrians killed during the first six months of 2019, 2020 and 2021.

Pedestrian deaths from Jan. 1 to June 30 are up more than 11 percent in Illinois since 2019, when 70 people were killed. That number jumped to 77 in 2020, then 78 in 2021.

Nationwide, pedestrian fatalities during the first six months of the year spiked nearly 17 percent, from 2,951 in 2019 to 3,441 during that same six-month period last year, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association report. That’s an increase of 507 deaths.

The increasing risk people face of being killed while doing something as healthy as walking instead of driving to get where they’re going is “completely unacceptable,” said transportation safety expert Pam Shadel Fischer, a senior executive for the highway safety group.

“We have to recognize that everybody — I know this sounds pie-in-the-sky — has a right to the road,” Fischer told Patch. “We’ve become so car-centric, and that’s been our focus. Our priority in infrastructure is how we move vehicles.”

Fischer noted a troubling, 46 percent increase in pedestrian deaths over the past decade, from 4,457 in 2011 to 6,516 in 2020.

“We can’t keep doing this,” she said.

The Governors Highway Safety Association is a nonprofit group representing state safety offices that use federal grant money to address the issues on highways that result from a driver’s behavior behind the wheel. Its “Spotlight on Highway Safety” report is based on preliminary data provided by the member public safety departments in all 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Roads prioritizing fast-moving traffic over slower, pedestrian-friendly speeds — along with inadequate sidewalks and poor lighting — have contributed to rising pedestrian fatalities for more than a decade. However, Fischer said there were some big behavioral issues at play during the period covered by the report.

A surge in dangerous driving that began when Americans saw wide-open highways at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and “put the pedal to the metal” has continued as traffic volume returns to more normal levels, Fischer said.

“Speed is a factor,” she said. “There’s a culture in this country that ‘nothing bad happens,’ but one-third of all fatalities have speed as a factor. The higher the rate of speed, the likelihood of survival is going to go down. We’ve got to slow it down.”.

Those heavy-footed drivers may have felt safe in opening up their engines because the behavior of law enforcement agencies also changed, Fischer said, explaining many pulled back on patrols in the wake of George Floyd’s murder because of perceived safety issues for officers.

“We know that. We’ve heard it,” she said. “There’s been a call since that happened to defund the police because of concerns about equity. We’ve heard it from our law enforcement agencies and partners. There are not as many police out there, so people think it’s less likely they’ll be pulled over.”

For example, in Minneapolis, where Floyd was killed, police scaled back their patrols, Reuters reported. A report in The Atlantic detailed police sickouts in Atlanta. Floyd’s killing sparked a nationwide “defund the police” movement, and the Los Angeles Police Department responded by curtailing in-person responses, the Los Angeles Times reported.

All traffic fatalities are increasing: 31,720 people died in the first three quarters of 2021, the highest number of fatalities during the first nine months of any year since 2006.

Some driver behaviors that have made the nation’s open roads so dangerous are spilling into local communities where people are most likely to walk, Fischer said, citing reports from Governors Highway Safety Association members about increases in both distracted and impaired driving, whether from alcohol or drug use.

Fischer said the report is a call to transportation planners to think more about pedestrian safety in road design and to consider enforcement tools such as speed and red light cameras. At the same time, she said, law enforcement should “flip the switch and get back on track to address risky behavior that puts all road users at risk.”

“We’re coming out of, I hope, a pandemic and public health crisis that has grounded us in thinking about what we can do to protect ourselves,” Fischer said. “Our other public health issue is traffic crashes. The vast majority are preventable. Somebody did something, and it would have been prevented if they had not made those choices.”

Instead of thinking “about how quickly we can get somewhere and how quickly we can do whatever, we need to think about how safely can I get there and make sure all the people out there are safe?”

At A Glance

• Nationally, there were 1.04 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people, up from 0.90 in both 2020 and 2019.
• The rate of drivers striking and killing pedestrians rose to 2.3 deaths per billion vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the first six months of 2021, an increase from the historically high rate of 2.2 deaths per billion VMT in 2020 and significantly more than the rate of 1.8-1.9, which remained steady in 2017-2019.
• Pedestrian fatalities increased in 39 states and the District of Columbia during the first half of 2021. At the same time, 11 states saw declines in pedestrian deaths. Three states reported two consecutive years of declines, and two states posted double-digit fatality reductions in 2021.
• Three states with warmer climates that encourage foot travel — California, Florida and Texas — accounted for 37 percent of all pedestrian deaths in the first six months of 2021 but are home to 27 percent of the U.S. population.