68,244 pedestrians were injured in traffic crashes in 2023 Alcohol use was reported in 46% of all fatal pedestrian crashes in 2023, with a blood alcohol concentration of .01 for the driver and/or the pedestrian.
In 2023, urban areas had a pedestrian fatality rate much higher (84%) than rural areas (16%).
74% of the pedestrian fatalities occurred at locations that were not intersections, 17% occurred at intersections, and the remaining 9% occurred at other locations in 2023.
More pedestrian fatalities occurred in the dark (77%) than in daylight (19%), dusk (2%), and dawn (2%) in 2023.
So one in every 10,000 people gets hit by a car while walking every year.
Something I’ve heard about car crashes in general is that they’re usually the confluence of two mistakes, so you have one driver do something crazy like swerve in front of another car too closely and the other driver doesn’t do anything about it. If you assume both actions are equally likely, you’d expect the probability of “close calls” (one driver does something crazy) to be about the square root of the probablity of an actual crash.
So if we assume[1] something similar with pedestrian injuries, where your chances of a driver doing something crazy like blasting through a red light and the chances of a pedestrian not noticing and jumping out of the way are the same[2], we’d expect 1⁄100 drivers[3] to do something crazy every year and 1⁄100 times the pedestrian not to notice and get injured, leading to 1/(100*100) = 1⁄10,000 pedestrians getting ensured by a car every year.
So maybe as a person who walks a lot in an urban environment, you should expect to see seeming-close-calls relatively often, but the actual chances of getting injured (assuming you maintain vigilance) seem to be low in absolute terms.
It would be a huge coincidence if this was the case, so in reality it’s probably the case that more drivers blow through stop lights and fewer pedestrians don’t notice; or fewer drivers blow through stop lights and more pedestrians don’t notice. You experience makes me lean toward the “more bad drivers” case.
I’d expect the baseline denominator to be “number of times a pedestrian crosses a roadway”.
Drivers blast through red lights more frequently than you might expect. However, they almost all do it when there aren’t any pedestrians crossing or any other cars on their road, because the presence of stopped vehicles or crossing pedestrians in the road ahead is a much stronger visual prompt than a more abstract light that isn’t even in their path. The most dangerous case is where the road ahead of the car is currently completely clear, but someone is about to step into the road (or a car is about to enter the intersection from a side road).
Likewise pedestrians almost always notice cars not slowing down to stop, even when they have a walk signal and are about to cross. Cars in high speed motion are somewhat noisy even without combustion engine noise, even when the pedestrian can’t see the road.
So a pedestrian collision usually needs all five of: inattentive driver, a road with no obvious visible obstacles, a pedestrian that doesn’t notice the car either, entering the road on the same side, within a narrow time window around when the car passes through. Even then, most impacts are not fatal (~10% from the linked site).
A car coming out of a parking garage almost certainly won’t kill if it hits, because most impacts that kill pedestrians are at substantially greater speeds. Also almost all are “glancing” hits that throw the pedestrian aside due to the pedestrian only being partly in the path of the car at the time of impact.
I too have experienced a number of “near misses” without actual collision, and that’s exactly what I would expect given the statistics.
So one in every 10,000 people gets hit by a car while walking every year.
Hm. 1 in 10k. I’m trying to think about how that squares with my expectation that “actual” is much less “intuition”.
I’ll pretty roughly approximate the number of “close calls” my intuition expects a person to encounter as something like 5-10 a year. Let’s say 5. And I’ll also guesstimate that for a given “close call”, there’s a 9⁄10 chance either you jump out of the way or the driver swerves out of the way, so only a 1⁄10 chance you actually get killed.
That’d mean that in a given year there’s a 1 - (0.9)^5 ~ 0.41 probability of a given person dying, so 4,100 in every 10,000 rather than 1 in every 10,000.
I feel like I might be missing or misunderstanding something though.
I haven’t experienced anything like 5-10 close calls per year. I’ve experienced about 3-5 in my life so far. I’d expect about 1 in 100 or so of incidents as close or closer to be actual hits, and that may be overestimating. In every case that I can remember, there were at least two factors that (narrowly, but quite definitely) prevented being hit. Even if they had, none of the incidents were likely to have been fatal and probably not even very injurious.
The only pedestrian-car collision I’ve ever personally seen was a child running directly across a road in front of a speeding car from between parked cars on their side of the road.
If the child wasn’t running, the driver would likely have had time to swerve. If there were no parked cars, they would likely have seen the child approaching the road. If the car was being driven at a normal speed for the road, the driver may have had more time to stop or evade. Fortunately the child suffered no injuries beyond abrasions and bruises.
The stats I could find were for reported injuries, so maybe a decent proportion of “actually hit by a car” doesn’t cause serious enough injuries to report?
Also the stats were for everyone in US. You might also be overestimating how often normal people walk places. I’d guess we’re both outliers in how much we walk places. And some of the people included in the stats are extremely old people and babies.
There’s some stats for this here: https://www.trafficsafetymarketing.gov/safety-topics/pedestrian-safety
So one in every 10,000 people gets hit by a car while walking every year.
Something I’ve heard about car crashes in general is that they’re usually the confluence of two mistakes, so you have one driver do something crazy like swerve in front of another car too closely and the other driver doesn’t do anything about it. If you assume both actions are equally likely, you’d expect the probability of “close calls” (one driver does something crazy) to be about the square root of the probablity of an actual crash.
So if we assume[1] something similar with pedestrian injuries, where your chances of a driver doing something crazy like blasting through a red light and the chances of a pedestrian not noticing and jumping out of the way are the same[2], we’d expect 1⁄100 drivers[3] to do something crazy every year and 1⁄100 times the pedestrian not to notice and get injured, leading to 1/(100*100) = 1⁄10,000 pedestrians getting ensured by a car every year.
So maybe as a person who walks a lot in an urban environment, you should expect to see seeming-close-calls relatively often, but the actual chances of getting injured (assuming you maintain vigilance) seem to be low in absolute terms.
With basically no evidence.
It would be a huge coincidence if this was the case, so in reality it’s probably the case that more drivers blow through stop lights and fewer pedestrians don’t notice; or fewer drivers blow through stop lights and more pedestrians don’t notice. You experience makes me lean toward the “more bad drivers” case.
This should actually be in terms of driver-hours or driver-miles or something like that, but I’m already handwaving so much it doesn’t really matter.
I’d expect the baseline denominator to be “number of times a pedestrian crosses a roadway”.
Drivers blast through red lights more frequently than you might expect. However, they almost all do it when there aren’t any pedestrians crossing or any other cars on their road, because the presence of stopped vehicles or crossing pedestrians in the road ahead is a much stronger visual prompt than a more abstract light that isn’t even in their path. The most dangerous case is where the road ahead of the car is currently completely clear, but someone is about to step into the road (or a car is about to enter the intersection from a side road).
Likewise pedestrians almost always notice cars not slowing down to stop, even when they have a walk signal and are about to cross. Cars in high speed motion are somewhat noisy even without combustion engine noise, even when the pedestrian can’t see the road.
So a pedestrian collision usually needs all five of: inattentive driver, a road with no obvious visible obstacles, a pedestrian that doesn’t notice the car either, entering the road on the same side, within a narrow time window around when the car passes through. Even then, most impacts are not fatal (~10% from the linked site).
A car coming out of a parking garage almost certainly won’t kill if it hits, because most impacts that kill pedestrians are at substantially greater speeds. Also almost all are “glancing” hits that throw the pedestrian aside due to the pedestrian only being partly in the path of the car at the time of impact.
I too have experienced a number of “near misses” without actual collision, and that’s exactly what I would expect given the statistics.
Hm. 1 in 10k. I’m trying to think about how that squares with my expectation that “actual” is much less “intuition”.
I’ll pretty roughly approximate the number of “close calls” my intuition expects a person to encounter as something like 5-10 a year. Let’s say 5. And I’ll also guesstimate that for a given “close call”, there’s a 9⁄10 chance either you jump out of the way or the driver swerves out of the way, so only a 1⁄10 chance you actually get killed.
That’d mean that in a given year there’s a
1 - (0.9)^5 ~ 0.41probability of a given person dying, so 4,100 in every 10,000 rather than 1 in every 10,000.I feel like I might be missing or misunderstanding something though.
I haven’t experienced anything like 5-10 close calls per year. I’ve experienced about 3-5 in my life so far. I’d expect about 1 in 100 or so of incidents as close or closer to be actual hits, and that may be overestimating. In every case that I can remember, there were at least two factors that (narrowly, but quite definitely) prevented being hit. Even if they had, none of the incidents were likely to have been fatal and probably not even very injurious.
The only pedestrian-car collision I’ve ever personally seen was a child running directly across a road in front of a speeding car from between parked cars on their side of the road.
If the child wasn’t running, the driver would likely have had time to swerve. If there were no parked cars, they would likely have seen the child approaching the road. If the car was being driven at a normal speed for the road, the driver may have had more time to stop or evade. Fortunately the child suffered no injuries beyond abrasions and bruises.
The stats I could find were for reported injuries, so maybe a decent proportion of “actually hit by a car” doesn’t cause serious enough injuries to report?
Also the stats were for everyone in US. You might also be overestimating how often normal people walk places. I’d guess we’re both outliers in how much we walk places. And some of the people included in the stats are extremely old people and babies.