The following post was written by Dustin Robertson, Thriving Communities Program Manager, and Megan Wright, Senior Associate of Economic Development.
7,522 people were hit and killed while walking in 2022—an alarming increase that represents a 40-year high in preventable pedestrian deaths. Yet, at the local level, these deaths are often seen as individual instances, disguising the depth of the issue. Gaps in slow-to-update national datasets are part of the problem.
Part of the reason we must continue to publish new editions of Dangerous by Design is that people often experience the death of a person walking as a singular tragedy, unaware of the national trends. Lack of knowledge about the pedestrian safety crisis slows much-needed progress at the local, state, and national levels.
Federal reporting on traffic safety is essential to improving awareness of this ongoing, ever-heightening crisis. Unfortunately, federal data is slow to deliver and often fails to show the full extent of the issue.
Inconsistent race and demographic information
Gaps and inconsistencies in data on race and ethnicity can disguise national-level trends, making it very challenging for leaders to target resources and actions to the communities that most need them. Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are often placed in the same category to display statistically significant results, which makes any differences in these two groups’ traffic fatality data difficult to identify.1
For another example, the race and ethnicity data on death certificates for American Indian and Alaska Native people often does not match their responses to the Current Population Survey (33 percent of the time). Until 2018, multiracial people were only identified by their first race listed. Such inconsistencies, when combined with other problems such as undercounting and underreporting lead to a data set of questionable quality.
Specific data that can be separated by race and ethnicity is a relatively new practice, only starting in the 1980s and 1990s, making historical trends in race-related fatalities difficult to identify.
On the other hand, states such as Connecticut, Louisiana, Maine, Pennyslvania, and New York showed significant gaps in reporting race and ethnicity data.
Unintuitive datasets
Although NHTSA released their data in April, there is little effort to make it accessible. The agency produces some baseline reports about overall trends, but to dig deeper, users have to wade through a complicated and confusing website to find the right datasets.
Data included in their yearly releases is vast, containing dozens of variables that produce millions of individual data points, and the spreadsheet that contains it is not coded or named in intuitive ways. Any advocate or practitioner looking to make use of these datasets will need to invest a great deal of time and energy, and might require access to often expensive analysis software.
Data is out-of-date by the time it’s released
The way data is released, not just what information it contains, is also a major issue. The 2022 data was released in April 2024–a 16-month delay. The lag for 2021 data was about the same. As we have pointed out in the past, it is hard for safety and transportation agencies at almost any level to tackle the root causes of this epidemic when our picture of the crisis is always over 12 months out of date.
USDOT and NHTSA need to be more transparent about how they produce this data and explain exactly why it takes so long—so that Congress, states, and advocates can work with them to address those issues.
We can’t properly evaluate safety without better, more comprehensive, and timely data. Learn more about out how traffic safety reporting should improve here.