Virus kept cars off the roads last year, but pedestrian deaths stayed high
Remember those images of empty streets without people and cars from the early days of lockdown last year?
Those memorable photos, captured as the coronavirus pandemic was upending daily life, meant a drop, at least for a time, in the amount of vehicle miles being driven. Unfortunately, that didn’t translate into a drop in pedestrian deaths.
Instead, a preliminary data analysis released by the Governors Highway Safety Association shows a shocking 20% increase in the pedestrian fatality rate per billion vehicle miles traveled during the first six months of the year.
Despite the impact of COVID-19 on daily life, including a shift to remote learning and working from home, the number of fatalities in the first half of the 2020 appears to have been close to the same as the prior year, with 2,957 pedestrian deaths for the first six months of 2020 compared with 2,951 in 2019, according to safety association projections.
The key figure, however, in the context of the pandemic is how that relates to the number of vehicle miles traveled, which dropped 16.5% compared with the same period in 2019. The pedestrian fatality rate of 2.2 per billion vehicle miles traveled represents a 20% increase over the 2019 rate, according to the analysis of data from state highway safety offices.
However, the numbers, all based on preliminary data, point to some improvements as well.
Twenty states and Washington, D.C., recorded declines in the number of pedestrian fatalities, some of which were double digit and percentage declines, compared with the first half of 2019.