In 2021, nearly 43,000 people died in motor vehicle-related crashes in the United States—the highest number of US traffic fatalities since 2005, and more than a 10 percent increase from 2020 mortality estimates. Meanwhile, US pedestrian deaths have reached a 40-year high. Now, a new analysis suggests that this worsening and preventable public health problem affects certain populations more than others.
A new study by Boston University School of Public Health (BUSPH) and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health has found that Black and Hispanic Americans are disproportionately affected by traffic-related deaths—and that these disparities in fatalities are larger than previous estimates show. Published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on Tuesday, June 7, 2022, the study found that travel distances vary among racial/ethnic groups when walking, cycling, or driving—and when these differences in activity levels are taken into account, Black Americans had the highest traffic fatality rate per mile traveled and across all modes, followed by Hispanics, Whites, and Asians. These disparities were particularly stark for walking and cycling, and during evening hours.
The study provides a more accurate assessment of racial/ethnic disparities in traffic deaths than previous traffic mortality studies, which have not accounted for these differences in travel distances, and thus, underestimated both the traffic-related risks and deaths that Black and Hispanic Americans experience. These findings may also point to structural racism within the US transportation system, the researchers say.
“We have created a system where walking and cycling are more dangerous than driving, and where Black and Hispanic Americans are at greater risk of fatality per mile traveled than White Americans,” says study corresponding author Matthew Raifman, a doctoral candidate at BUSPH. “It’s important to consider these disparities in traffic fatalities within the context of a transport system that suffers from racial bias—from the placement of roads, to traffic stops, to the way that ride-hail applications pair riders with drivers.”
For Hispanic walkers and bikers, the death rates were 1.5 and 1.7 times as high as those for white Americans using the same modes of transportation. The design of our cities is partly to blame for these troubling disparities. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries tend to be concentrated in poorer neighborhoods that have a larger share of Black and Hispanic residents.
In Los Angeles, for instance, a 2020 analysis by U.C.L.A. researchers found that although Black residents made up 8.6 percent of the city’s population, they represented more than 18 percent of all pedestrians killed and around 15 percent of all cyclists. From 2016 to 2020, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had more pedestrian deaths than any other metro area in the United States and a pedestrian death rate higher than the metropolitan areas around New York, Philadelphia or Washington.
Last year, 312 people died in traffic accidents in Los Angeles, the majority of them pedestrians and cyclists. “If 300 people died of something in the city, whether it was something violent or whether it was something else like Covid, the resources were put behind it to try to prevent those things, to respond to those things,” said Eunisses Hernandez, a member of the Los Angeles City Council. “We have not seen that same urgency with people dying in traffic accidents as pedestrians and as cyclists.”
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