New Ranking Lists the Most Dangerous Places to Walk in the United States

A new national ranking examines the most dangerous places to be a pedestrian in the United States.

Dangerous by Design 2016, the fourth edition of the landmark report from advocacy group Smart Growth America, calculates a Pedestrian Danger Index, or PDI, for the 104 largest metro areas in the United States as well as all 50 states and the District of Columbia. PDI is a calculation of the share of local commuters who walk to work (the best available measure of how many people are likely to be out walking each day) and the most recent data on pedestrian deaths.

Based on PDI, the 20 most dangerous metro areas for walking in the United States are:

Who are the victims of these collisions? People of color and older adults are overrepresented among pedestrian deaths. In addition, PDI is strongly correlated with median household income and rates of uninsured individuals. Low-income metro areas are predictably more dangerous than higher-income ones: as median household incomes drop, PDIs rise. Similar trends bear out with rates of uninsured individuals: as rates of uninsured individuals rise, so do PDIs, meaning that the people who can least afford to be injured often live in the most dangerous places.

“America is facing an obesity epidemic, and the U.S. Surgeon General has encouraged people to walk more to help address it,” said Emiko Atherton, director of the National Complete Streets Coalition, a program of Smart Growth America. “But how can we ask people to walk more when so many streets are so dangerous for pedestrians? It’s outrageous.”

The full report was released in collaboration with AARP, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associated.

A link to the full report, along with interactive maps illustrating the report findings, can be found here: http://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design.