“From 2000 to 2009, 47,700 pedestrians were killed in the United States, the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of passengers crashing roughly every month.”
And now you can see, region by region in the U.S., where those ped deaths occurred, in Dangerous by Design: an interactive map of pedestrian fatalities in the United States.
Here’s the map of the Orlando-Kissimmee metro area in Florida – the most dangerous of them all:
Thanks to Gladys We.
These sorts of maps and statistics really need a solid denominator, accepted and vetted by public health, engineering, and planning professionals. I suspect that you could use the same map as a proxy for population density, too.
The really interesting question (which needs the denominator), is ‘what locations have higher than normal/average/tolerable crash rates?’ with an emphasis on the rates. Surely there are certain intersections, neighbourhoods, and cities where there really are problems, but merely recording the number of incidents doesn’t really get at this.
This goes for the jumbo jet metaphor, too. Is that jumbo jet one of ten monthly flights, or ten million? And which flights are more likely to go down? Is it uniform, or only flights to certain airports?
I don’t think you could use the map as a proxy for population density. The list of US metro areas by population density is:
1. New York metropolitan area
2. Greater Los Angeles Area
3. South Florida metropolitan area
4. Greater Boston
5. Chicago metropolitan area
6. Delaware Valley
7. San Francisco Bay Area
8. Pittsburgh metropolitan area
9. Louisville-Jefferson County metropolitan area
10. Providence metropolitan area
11. Washington Metropolitan Area
12. Dallas–Fort Worth Metroplex
13. Buffalo-Niagara Falls metropolitan area
14. Portland metropolitan area
15. Metro Detroit
16. Greater Cleveland
The list of pedestrian deaths is:
1. Orlando-Kissimmee, FL
2. Tampa-St. Petersburg-Clearwater, FL
3. Jacksonville, FL
4. Miami-Fort Lauderdale-Pompano Beach, FL
5. Riverside-San Bernardino-Ontario, CA
6. Las Vegas-Paradise, NV
7. Memphis, TN-MS-AR
8. Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale, AZ
9. Houston-Sugar Land-Baytown, TX
10. Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington, TX
The “10 deadliest” list only includes 3 of the 16 densest metro areas in the US.
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_by_population_density#Metropolitan_areas)
D,
Your comments are actually all addressed in the report itself – a very readable full colour pdf full of graphics – check it out!