Pedestrian Deaths Highest in Detroit

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By Douglas A. McIntyre Published
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Add to the list of reasons it is dangerous to live in Detroit that it is the most perilous city for pedestrians, at least in so far as people who are killed by automobiles.

A new study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports that the fatality rate in Detroit during 2012 per 100,000 pedestrians was 3.99. Next on the list was Oklahoma City at 3.34, followed by Albuquerque at 3.24. Other cities with a number higher than three include Dallas at 3.22, Jacksonville at 3.23 and El Paso at 3.12.

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At the other end of the spectrum, the safest city for pedestrians in 2012 was Boston at 0.79. Also below one traffic death per 100,000 pedestrians were Columbus at 0.99, Baltimore at 0.97 and Louisville at 0.99. Cities on the list needed to have populations above 500,000.

In summary, the report on pedestrian fatalities said:

In 2012, 4,743 pedestrians were killed and an estimated 76,000 were injured in traffic crashes in the United States On average, a pedestrian was killed every 2 hours and injured every 7 minutes in traffic crashes.

A pedestrian, as defined for the purpose of this Traffic Safety Fact Sheet, is any person on foot, walking, running, jogging, hiking, sitting or lying down who is involved in a motor vehicle traffic crash. Also, a traffic crash is defined as an incident that involves one or more vehicles where at least one vehicle is in transport and the crash originates on a public trafficway. Crashes that occurred exclusively on private property, including parking lots and driveways, were excluded.

The 4,743 pedestrian fatalities in 2012 represented an increase of 6 percent from 2011 and were the highest number of fatalities in the last 5 years. In 2012, pedestrian deaths accounted for 14 percent of all traffic fatalities, and made up 3 percent of all the people injured in traffic crashes.

In other words, it has become increasingly more dangerous to cross the street — or lie down in one.

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Photo of Douglas A. McIntyre
About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.

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