America’s Deadliest Streets Aren’t Random: They’re Built That Way

Pedestrian Deaths Have Surged 68% Since 2000. Researchers Say Zoning Codes Are a Major Reason Why.

Every year, thousands of pedestrians and cyclists are killed on American roads, and the numbers keep climbing. Headlines often frame these deaths as tragic accidents or the result of reckless behavior. But a study published in the Journal of the American Planning Association points the finger at least partially on how cities and suburbs were designed in the first place.

Researchers Eric Dumbaugh and Jonathan Stiles examined 222 miles of urban arterial roads in Florida, then used those findings to explain a broader U.S. planning pattern. More specifically, the connection between where communities put grocery stores, pharmacies, and fast-food restaurants and the persistent toll of deaths and injuries among people walking and biking.

For decades, the conversation around traffic safety has centered on driver behavior, vehicle design, and speed limits. Dumbaugh and Stiles argue those conversations miss a big piece of the puzzle. Many American communities were physically laid out with wide, fast-moving roads connecting low-density residential areas to commercial strips, with little thought given to safe crossings or pedestrian infrastructure. These dangerous conditions aren’t an accident of fate. They’re an outcome of planning decisions made years or even decades ago, and everyday destinations placed along high-speed arterials keep drawing people into places that were not built to protect them.

Why A Trip to Walmart Could Be a Matter of Life and Death

Researchers focused on 10 arterial highways across the Miami, Orlando, and Tampa regions, covering 334 corridor segments and 489 intersections. Crash data from 2017 to 2020 was layered on top of land use records, road design measurements, and census information to look for patterns. Of all the variables tested, two land uses stood out: grocery stores, pharmacies, and convenience stores, grouped together as everyday household destinations, and fast-food restaurants. At major intersections, each grocery or pharmacy was linked to a 10.7% increase in crashes involving pedestrian and cyclist deaths or injuries; each fast-food restaurant was linked to a 25% increase.

What makes this pattern so damaging isn’t that these stores exist. It’s where they’re located. In the United States, decades of zoning practice have pushed these everyday destinations onto busy arterials, away from neighborhoods, because planners wanted to keep residential streets quiet and funnel commercial activity to high-traffic roads. That made sense for cars. For someone on foot or a bicycle trying to reach a pharmacy, it can be fatal.

Pedestrian Deaths Keep Rising While Other Traffic Deaths Stay Flat

Even as vehicle safety technology has improved, deaths among pedestrians and cyclists have climbed. Between 2000 and 2020, the number killed each year increased by 68%. Pedestrians and cyclists now account for roughly one in five traffic deaths in the U.S., and on a per-mile-traveled basis, they are 30 times more likely to be killed than people inside vehicles. Meanwhile, countries like Sweden and the United Kingdom have cut overall traffic deaths by more than half over the same period.

Part of the difference, the researchers argue, is that European countries either prohibit or tightly restrict commercial development along their highest-speed roads. In Germany, streets are explicitly designed around whether there is development alongside them, with target speeds capped at 18 mph in areas with adjacent storefronts. American planning has no equivalent rule. Zoning codes actively encourage household destinations onto the most dangerous roads.

The study also points to a fairness problem. Crash patterns often followed routes between lower-income communities and everyday retail destinations. Prior research cited by the authors has also linked pedestrian crash risk with lower-income and minority communities, who are more likely to walk or bike out of necessity rather than choice, and who often live near the corridors where these risks are most concentrated.

Fixing Pedestrian Deaths Means Rethinking Where Stores Go

Dumbaugh and Stiles compared crash rates on conventional arterials to seven walkable commercial street segments in the same Florida metro areas, streets with slower speeds, buildings close to the sidewalk, and on-street parking rather than sprawling lots. Those walkable segments had more stores per mile than any of the arterial segments studied, yet recorded far fewer crashes, with severe crash rates running as much as 80% lower.

That kind of improvement doesn’t require tearing up every road in America. There are 178,000 miles of urban arterials in the United States, more than three times the length of the Interstate Highway System, and rebuilding even a fraction is an enormous undertaking. But revising zoning rules that push everyday stores onto high-speed roads, and rethinking site design for existing shopping centers, are tools local planners already have.

Pedestrian and cyclist deaths in the United States are not an unavoidable side effect of car culture. They track, with uncomfortable precision, to where communities decided to put the grocery store.

---

Disclaimer: This article is based on an observational study and does not establish direct cause-and-effect relationships between land use and individual crashes. Findings are drawn from arterial corridors in Florida and may not apply uniformly to all communities nationwide.

---