A vulnerable road user is anyone on or near a road who lacks the protective shell of a motor vehicle. Pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists, e-scooter riders, wheelchair users, and people on skateboards all fall into this category. Globally, these road users account for half of all traffic deaths, a figure that has pushed governments to create specific legal protections and infrastructure changes aimed at keeping them safer.
Who Counts as a Vulnerable Road User
Under U.S. federal law (23 USC § 148), a vulnerable road user is defined as a “nonmotorist” whose death or serious injury is tracked through the national fatality reporting system. In practice, this covers pedestrians, bicyclists, e-bike and e-scooter riders, people using wheelchairs or mobility devices, skateboarders, and anyone else traveling outside a car, truck, or enclosed vehicle.
The World Health Organization uses a slightly broader lens that also includes motorcyclists, since riders of powered two- and three-wheelers face many of the same physical risks. By the WHO’s count, pedestrians make up 23% of global road fatalities, powered two- and three-wheeler riders 21%, and cyclists 6%. Combined, that’s roughly 50% of all people killed on roads worldwide, despite the fact that these groups take up far less road space than cars and trucks.
Why These Road Users Face Greater Risk
The core issue is simple physics. A person on foot or on a bicycle has no crumple zone, no airbag, and no seatbelt. When a vehicle strikes a pedestrian, the risk of severe injury reaches 25% at just 23 mph and 50% at 31 mph. The risk of death follows a similar curve: a 10% chance of dying at 23 mph, rising to 50% at 42 mph. These numbers, from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, show how even moderate speeds in a parking lot or residential street can be life-threatening.
Vehicle design makes a significant difference. A meta-analysis comparing SUVs and light trucks to standard passenger cars found that pedestrians and cyclists struck by the larger vehicles were 44% more likely to die. For children, that figure jumped to 82%. The reason is mechanical: SUVs and trucks have taller, blunter front ends that strike a person’s torso or head rather than their legs, transferring more energy to vital organs. Even vehicles with a tall but sloped hood increased pedestrian fatality odds by 45% compared to a traditional low-profile sedan.
Age Makes a Difference
Children and older adults face compounding risks beyond the basic lack of vehicle protection. Children are shorter, making them harder for drivers to see, and their ability to judge vehicle speed and distance is still developing. The meta-analysis on vehicle type found that children struck by SUVs had nearly double the fatality odds compared to those struck by passenger cars, a wider gap than for adults.
Older adults are disproportionately affected on the other end of the age spectrum. In 2017, 48% of all U.S. pedestrian fatalities were people aged 50 and older. Contributing factors include slower walking speeds that don’t match signal timing, reduced peripheral vision, and age-related bone fragility that makes the same impact force more likely to cause fatal injuries. Community-level factors also play a role: research from Massachusetts found that higher rates of disability, winter weather, rush-hour traffic, and neighborhoods lacking pedestrian-friendly design all increased crash risk for older residents.
E-Bikes and E-Scooters as Newer Categories
The rise of electric micro-mobility has expanded the vulnerable road user category in ways that many local laws are still catching up to. E-bikes and e-scooters travel faster than traditional bicycles, putting riders in closer proximity to motor vehicle speeds while still offering zero structural protection.
An analysis of nearly 14,000 micro-mobility injuries treated in U.S. emergency departments during 2021 and 2022 found that about 15% of injured riders required hospital admission. Contrary to the perception that e-scooters are uniquely dangerous, injured e-scooter users were not more likely to suffer severe injuries than bicyclists or e-bike users. E-bike riders actually had the highest rate of crashes involving a motor vehicle at 33%, compared to 26% for bicyclists and 23% for e-scooter riders. Across all micro-mobility types, the factors most strongly linked to severe injury were older age, being male, involvement of a motor vehicle, and alcohol or substance use.
Nighttime Is the Most Dangerous Period
Roughly 75% of fatal pedestrian crashes happen at night, making darkness the single biggest environmental risk factor for vulnerable road users. Modern vehicles increasingly come equipped with pedestrian automatic emergency braking systems designed to detect a person in the road and stop the car, but these systems perform significantly worse after dark.
Testing shows detection rates of about 98% during daylight but only 87% at night with low-beam headlights and 93% with high beams. Even when the system detects a pedestrian at night, crashes still occurred in 23% of low-beam tests compared to 10% during the day, and those nighttime crashes happened at higher speeds. Halogen low beams can reduce detection capability by up to 43% compared to daytime conditions. The takeaway for anyone walking or cycling at night: reflective clothing and lights help, but vehicle safety technology is not yet reliable enough to close the gap.
Legal Protections in the U.S.
At least twelve U.S. states have passed laws specifically protecting vulnerable road users: Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington. These laws work in two ways. Some impose harsher penalties when a driver violates an existing traffic law (running a red light, texting while driving) and that violation injures or kills a vulnerable road user. Others create entirely new offenses, such as prohibiting drivers from passing a cyclist within a certain distance.
Most of these laws increase fines and expand civil liability when negligent or intentional driving behavior leads to the death or serious injury of someone outside a vehicle. The underlying principle is deterrence: if the consequences are steeper when a violation harms an unprotected person, drivers may be more cautious around them. These laws are still relatively new, and the list of states adopting them continues to grow as pedestrian and cyclist fatality numbers remain stubbornly high across the country.