Last year, an estimated 3,373 pedestrians were killed while walking in the US between January and June alone.
“We’ve faced a situation where it is getting safer and safer to be inside a vehicle, while becoming more and more dangerous to be outside a vehicle, and it’s time for us to turn this situation around,” says Dan Langenkamp, a constituent of Raskin’s. Langenkamp became a safe streets advocate after his wife, Sarah Debbink Langenkamp, was killed while riding her bike in 2022.
As a diplomat, Debbink Langenkamp had been evacuated from Ukraine for her safety after the Russian invasion, only to be killed by a truck on a street in the Washington, DC, suburbs.
“Without legislators doing this, our government won’t move, I don’t think,” Langenkamp says.
We’ve known that bigger, heavier vehicles are more dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists for decades.
In 2004, researchers at Rowan University published a study which noted that light trucks — vehicles like SUVs and pickups — posed a greater risk of life-threatening head or thoracic injuries when they hit people due to their size, weight, and relative stiffness. Another systematic review of available research performed in 2010 found that the risk of a fatal injury for pedestrians struck with a light truck was 50 percent greater than it was for someone hit by a conventional car.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which oversees vehicle safety ratings, has been circling around the idea of adding pedestrian safety tests for years now.
The agency asked the public in 2015 for commentary on adding a pedestrian protection testing program similar to those used in Europe. In 2022, NHTSA suggested a 10-year road map to upgrade the overall safety ratings, called the New Car Assessment Program, or NCAP.
Last year the agency proposed not changing the 5-star rating system immediately, in favor of issuing a “pass-fail” grade for vehicles on pedestrian safety and making the grades available online. The agency says it will consider updating the ratings in future updates to NCAP.
Anyone who’s worked on policy before knows that change takes a lot of time, especially where the government is concerned.
But this feels like way too long, especially considering the number of pedestrian and cyclist deaths in recent years. Vox reached out to NHTSA for an update on their efforts, but they didn’t respond by publication time.
Thousands of people are dying while walking in the US every year — too many to justify waiting another 10 years before making meaningful, substantive change to how we rate vehicles.
Even lawmakers are frustrated.
“For too long the federal government has prioritized moving cars quickly to the exclusion of all other transportation priorities. This philosophy has had deadly ramifications,” says Rep. Earl Blumenauer, an Oregon Democrat who’s been pushing Congress for safer streets and vehicles for 28 years. “It’s time to design vehicles that don’t maim pedestrians. It should not be this hard.”
—Marin Cogan, senior correspondent
