Crossing the street shouldn’t take an act of heroism to complete. It is a simple task that has unfortunately become a scary one too. All it takes is one driver to not see you or one driver to lack the attention necessary when approaching an intersection, and you’ve got yourself a terrible pedestrian accident.
We are all pedestrians. At some point, we will all cross the street. We will all expect drivers to stop at the crosswalk and respect our space. And yet some drivers out there still lack the attention at certain moments to keep pedestrians safe.
Just consider some data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. According to the CDC, 4,735 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents in 2013. Another 150,000 pedestrians suffered injuries that were not deemed life-threatening in traffic accidents. The data also shows that a pedestrian is 1.5 times more likely to be killed in a car crash than a car passenger.
You probably didn’t even need those statistics to know how dangerous it is for pedestrians out on the road, but it does reinforce that point. Pedestrians have no protection out there. They have an invisible and not-literal barrier when they walk across the street called the crosswalk, and that zone is only as good as the drivers who care enough to respect it. If a driver enters the crosswalk and strikes a pedestrian, it is highly likely that the driver was at fault in some way.
Source: CDC, “Pedestrian Safety,” Accessed May 5, 2016
