RetroFedThe deadliest US cities for people walking. Don't visit Memphis.
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I feel cars above a certain size shouldnโt be equipped with seatbelts and airbags. Be dangerous, live dangerous.
Even bigger, the driver airbag becomes spikes.
If I donโt need a seatbelt on a bus, you donโt need one for your Hummer. Fantastic idea!
I wont even visit the US anymore, let alone Memphis.
This proves that one shouldnโt trust Marc Cohn.
Those numbers strike me as very low
Each bar covers 4 years. Are the X axis values per year or total?
As written it should be total.
Iโm pretty sure more people than that die while driving and texting.
Probably because so few people actually walk in North America.
Yes, more Americans die from cars while inside of them than outside of them, due simply to the percentage of us who are inside of them. For most of these cities, there probably arenโt even 100K people walking outside.
Is this what Marc Cohn meant about walking in memphis
When I was walking in Memphisโฆ.
Genuinely shocked that no Texas cities made the list.
Nobody walks anywhere?
Iโm shocked Tampa is not #1 on this list anymore, how can it be even worse than here? I donโt know anyone who doesnโt know someone killed by a car hitting them. Eternal vigilance on foot or bike; stop and look at EVERY intersection even if you have the right of way.
Maybe we just have more non-lethal strikes. I have been hit at slow speed twice, not injured, by cars turning right while looking left. Now I hit them with my hand to get their attention.
My brother was hit by a car while riding a bike three separate times in the Tampa/St Pete area. His back and spine are all fucked up.
As a born and bred former native of Albuquerque, seems correct.
Sad to see so many people romanticize the US city infrastructure and using it as an example on what cities should look and not an example on how they shouldnโt.
Bizarre how bad so many CA cities are when CA is such a wealthy, educated state. Youโd think we would fix these problems.
I found that strange too. But I guess a lot of cities are so unwalkable there are no pedestrians. I think this data should be % of pedestrians hit by cars or something
I was wondering how cities that are so terrible people just donโt walk them factors into it.
Yeah; I think this data is biased to only include places with a decent pedestrian culture
Below a certain threshold, being a pedestrian is less a lifestyle choice and more the only way to get around. A lot of those cities have high poverty rates.
Not familiar with Riverside, but Fresno and Bakersfield are both pretty damn poor and considered the โarmpitโ and โassholeโ of CA respectively.
I wonder how it correlates with municipal spending per capita on public safety and walkability infrastructure. Lot of underfunded, red-state cities on that list; I imagine Republican cities in CA might similarly underfund their safety infrastructure.
I think thatโs part of it but itโs also partly the legacy built environment. California leaned harder into auto-centric infrastructure than maybe anywhere else in the entire world. Thatโs starting to change but rebuilding an entire transportation system takes time.
Especially when public funds are scarce. Prop 13 does have a part here since tax increases generally require a supermajority of voter approval to be implemented.
Even here in Sacramento (weโre #20 on this list I believe) improvements have been slow despite there not being a single republican leader on the city council in recent memory. But they still wonโt put real funding into solving these things, instead focusing on symbolic improvements that donโt address the problem.
That makes sense. Iโm not familiar with CA policy specifically but in the southeast, all cities (at least, the ones Iโm familiar with) have in common:
So, itโs political safer to just continually complain about it than to spend oneโs capital on actually addressing the problem.
Yeah spot on here too I think. We do have a light rail but its reach is limited, most people live in spaced out suburbs, and the mode share is overwhelmingly car dominated.
The density issue is really hard to fix. Thereโs been so much conversation and debate about a new light rail line and even as a public transit advocate I have to wonder if it makes sense when youโre serving such a spread out population. The number of people within walking distance of the stations is so low when itโs just single-story houses on 1/4 acre lots as far as the eye can see.
Thatโs why Iโd rather focus on transforming the urban core into a really great car-lite destination. This is more physically and economically viable, but the issue is most voters in the suburbs wonโt like this because it makes it harder for them to access. Our metro area is so huge that cars are really the only practical way to cover that distance, so I think we need to build more urban town centers in every suburb. But they wonโt want to do so unless they can see a successful example, which theyโre currently blocking. Itโs a thorny issue.
Hmm maybe itโs temperature related
driving with all the windows closed, AC blasting, dark tinted windows to block sunlightโฆ seems reasonable to think the climate could have an impact.
You dont see any northern States in the list, although, the list is short.
Itโs not like there are many pedestrians in Minnesota in November. Places where it is warm year round would correspondingly have foot traffic year round.
Youโd be surprised. I biked to work almost all of November last year because we didnโt get snow until the very end of the month, and after that I walked a lot and took the bus lol.
Iโd rather walk here in winter than anywhere in August back in Florida.
In 2019, Minneapolis reported 16% of all trips into or out of the city were made on foot. In the same year, the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization reported 1.02% of commutes were done either walking or biking in Shelby County (the county containing Memphis). Commutes vs. all trips and 150 km2 city vs 2000km2 county, so itโs not a perfect comparison by any means, but I donโt think that data is indicative of a massive bias towards pedestrian activity in Memphis vs Minneapolis. Weather is not a strong indicator for pedestrian activity, infrastructure is. But infrastructure has a correlation with safety, so we donโt see high pedestrian modal share cities like New York, Chicago, or Boston on this list, but it has nothing to do with how cold their winters are
So you maintain that there are the same amount of pedestrians when it is 80F as when it is -20F? Does that mat make sense to anyone?
I maintain that the correlation between those two factors is not nearly as strong as people make it out to be when trying to explain away the violence that American sunbelt cities impose on their residents. -20 vs 80 is an extreme example (Minneapolis probably has as many of those days as Memphis has days above 100, which surely has its own negative impacts on the appeal of active transportation), but yes I suspect that you could find more people walking about in below freezing temperatures in a city that is built with pedestrians and their safety in mind than you will find out and about in balmy temperature in a city that is built to put the car above all other forms of transportation. I donโt even think itโs particularly counterintuitive if you think about it for a bit. Think about a snowy Christmas market, and then think about a 4โ wide, unevenly paved sidewalk flanked by a steep ditch on the side of a 6 lane highway in the most beautiful weather you can imagine. Which of those scenes would you be more surprised to see someone walking through?
Iโm in Chicago. Plentiful pedestrian options. We have 100 degree days and -20 days. There are by far fewer pedestrians when it is cold than when it is warm. Itโs not even comparable.
Maybe if blue suede became fashionable again.
Iโm not sure that
0.00006%0.006% of a city population dying as pedestrians means โdonโt visit.โIf a single person gets hit by a car in my city everyone is talking about it. Let alone 36
Okay. That doesnโt mean I shouldnโt visit other places.
What about 0.006%, as suggested by the post?
Oof, yeah, I forgot to covert my multiplier to a proper percent. Thanks.