Older adults, Black and Hispanic individuals, people walking at night, and anyone on foot near high-speed arterial roads face the greatest risk of being killed by a vehicle. In 2024, drivers struck and killed 7,148 pedestrians in the United States, a number nearly 20% higher than 2016 levels despite two consecutive years of modest decline. The risk isn’t spread evenly. Specific combinations of age, location, time of day, and road design concentrate danger on certain groups far more than others.
Adults Over 60 Face the Highest Death Rates
Pedestrians aged 60 to 70 account for 23% of all pedestrian fatalities, and those in the 60-to-64 bracket have the single highest fatality rate at 3.18 per 100,000 people. Two forces overlap here. Older adults are more likely to be struck in the first place, and once hit, they are more likely to die from their injuries due to the physical fragility that comes with aging.
The reasons older pedestrians get hit more often are largely practical. Age-related changes can slow walking speed, making it harder to clear an intersection before the signal changes. Judging the speed of an approaching vehicle becomes more difficult. Turning vehicles at intersections pose a particular challenge, and some older adults have trouble interpreting pedestrian signal phases. None of these are failures of awareness. They’re physical limitations that interact poorly with road infrastructure designed around younger, faster-moving bodies.
Race and Income Shape Pedestrian Risk
Black Americans had the highest pedestrian death rate of any racial or ethnic group in 2018 at 3.6 per 100,000, double the rate for white Americans (1.8 per 100,000). Hispanic individuals fell in between at 2.9. Every group saw death rates climb between 2009 and 2018, but the gap widened. Black pedestrians saw the steepest increase, rising from 2.5 to 3.6 per 100,000 over that period.
These numbers reflect infrastructure, not individual behavior. Lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color are more likely to have high-speed roads with few crosswalks, poor lighting, narrow or missing sidewalks, and long distances between safe crossing points. People who rely on walking or public transit rather than driving are exposed to traffic danger for more hours each day, compounding the risk.
Nighttime Is When Most Deaths Happen
Nearly 80% of all pedestrian deaths in the United States occur between sunset and sunrise. Of the roughly 7,500 pedestrian road deaths recorded in 2022, four out of five took place at night. This single factor, darkness, is the strongest environmental predictor of a fatal pedestrian crash.
Poor visibility cuts both ways. Drivers have less time to see and react to a person in the road, and pedestrians have more difficulty judging vehicle speed and distance. Arterial roads in suburban areas are especially dangerous after dark because they often lack streetlights adequate for the speeds vehicles travel. Research using moonlight as a natural experiment has confirmed that even modest improvements in ambient lighting reduce pedestrian deaths, reinforcing that darkness itself, not just the behaviors associated with nighttime, is a direct cause.
Arterial Roads Are the Most Dangerous Places to Walk
The surge in pedestrian deaths over the past decade has been concentrated on arterial roads: the wide, multi-lane corridors designed to move vehicle traffic quickly toward highways. Pedestrian deaths on arterials increased 67% during the period studied by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Deaths away from intersections rose 50%, while intersection deaths rose 35%. The pattern is clear: the most dangerous place to be a pedestrian is midblock on a busy, high-speed road with no crosswalk.
These roads are common in suburban areas, where residential neighborhoods, shopping centers, and bus stops sit along corridors built for 45-plus mph traffic. People need to cross them to reach transit, groceries, and work, but crossings may be spaced a half-mile apart or more. The result is that people cross where they can, not where it’s safe. Pedestrian hybrid beacons, a type of signal installed at midblock crossings, have been shown to reduce pedestrian crashes by 69% where they’re installed. But most arterial corridors still lack them.
Rural Crashes Are More Likely to Be Fatal
While more pedestrians are struck in urban and suburban areas simply because more people walk there, a pedestrian hit in a rural area is 2.3 times more likely to die from the collision, even after accounting for age, sex, and vehicle speed. A larger proportion of rural pedestrian fatalities die before reaching a hospital or within the first hour after injury. Higher vehicle speeds on rural roads and longer distances to trauma centers both contribute. If you’re walking along a rural highway with no shoulder, the odds of surviving a collision are significantly worse than in a city.
Larger Vehicles Pose Greater Danger
SUVs and light trucks now make up the majority of new vehicle sales in the United States, and they are measurably more lethal to pedestrians than sedans. An adult pedestrian hit by an SUV or light truck is 44% more likely to die than one hit by a passenger car. For children, the increase is even steeper: 82% higher odds of death when struck by a larger vehicle.
The physics are straightforward. Taller front ends strike a pedestrian higher on the body, hitting the chest and head rather than the legs. This transfers more force to vital organs. The trend toward heavier, taller vehicles with high hood lines has been a meaningful contributor to rising pedestrian deaths over the past decade, particularly for children whose entire bodies fall within the impact zone of a large grille.
Alcohol Impairment on Both Sides
Alcohol plays a role in a substantial share of pedestrian deaths, and not only on the driver’s side. Pedestrians with a blood alcohol concentration at or above the legal driving limit are 3.6 times more likely to be struck by a vehicle than sober pedestrians. Among fatally injured intoxicated pedestrians, 60% had blood alcohol levels at or above twice the legal limit for drivers. Alcohol impairs the ability to judge gaps in traffic, slows reaction time, and reduces awareness of surroundings. Severity of injuries also increases with intoxication, likely because alcohol affects the body’s physiological response to trauma.
Who Carries the Most Risk Overall
The highest-risk pedestrian in America is an older adult walking at night along a high-speed arterial road with no crosswalk, in a lower-income community with poor lighting and limited sidewalk infrastructure. Each risk factor compounds the others. Being over 60 increases both the likelihood of being hit and the likelihood of dying. Walking at night removes the visual cues that might give a driver time to stop. Arterial roads mean higher speeds and longer crossing distances. And living in a neighborhood with fewer safety features means these exposures happen daily, not occasionally.
Children face a distinct set of dangers. Their small stature makes them harder for drivers to see, and the growing dominance of SUVs and trucks on the road has made collisions disproportionately more deadly for them. Kids are also less able to judge vehicle speed and may behave unpredictably near roads.
Understanding these overlapping risks matters because most pedestrian deaths are preventable through infrastructure changes: better lighting, lower speed limits on arterials, more frequent crosswalks with pedestrian signals, and road designs that account for people outside of cars. The danger isn’t random. It follows predictable patterns of age, geography, road design, and time of day.