State Pedestrian Deaths Declined by 18% Last Year

Friday, January 5th, 2024 -- 12:00 PM

(Margaret Faust, Wisconsin Public Radio) After reaching a five-year-high in 2022, pedestrian deaths declined by 18 percent last year, according to preliminary data released by the Wisconsin Department of Transportation.

According to Margaret Faust with Wisconsin Public Radio, David Pabst, director of DOT's Bureau of Transportation Safety, said this is "really encouraging." "My hope is that people are heeding a lot of our safety messages and they're paying attention to what they're doing," Pabst said. "After (the pandemic), we had a lot of extra dangerous driving behavior, and maybe that's settled down and people have gotten out of their system."

Pabst said he hopes the numbers will continue to fall as roadways and vehicles are better designed. In 2022, 72 pedestrians were killed in 1,324 crashes between vehicles and walkers, according to the Wisconsin DOT.

That followed a national trend, with pedestrian deaths reaching a 40-year high, according to the Governors Highway Safety Association. Last year in Wisconsin, the number of pedestrian deaths fell to 59. Pabst said it’s too early to definitively explain the decrease between the two years.

He hopes it’s because drivers and pedestrians are changing their behavior. "We pay for advertising that talks about driving safely," Pabst said. "We put (in) a lot of extra effort, whether it's education or enforcement."

Andrea Bill, the associate director of the Traffic Operations and Safety Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin Madison, studies transportation. Bill said there is an uptick in the number of people walking and biking, which is a good thing, but it comes with responsibility.

"We need to have the balance of the drivers understanding about sharing the road and understanding it's not so vehicle-centric anymore," Bill said. She said low visibility of pedestrians, impaired driving and walking and speeding are three main contributing factors to pedestrian fatalities.

Distraction, both on the part of the driver and the pedestrian, is another concern. "When you're walking or biking or driving, you should be focused on the activity that you're doing, not what's on your phone or anything else," Bill said.

Pabst agreed and added that instead of looking at, holding and thinking about their phones, drivers and pedestrians should be looking at and thinking about the road. And there are more SUVs and light trucks on the road, according to the governor's report.

Larger vehicles are inherently more dangerous to pedestrians due to their weight and size.

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