Victor Montgomery, 62, was a security guard for the Pulaski County Special School District helping direct traffic on Highway 10 near Joe T. Robinson Elementary on the first day of the school year.
Terry Keefe, 79, was an outdoorsman and world traveler taking his typical three-mile, early morning walk with his wife, Kathy, on the roads of western Pulaski County
Mark Lorge, 71, was making his way across a JFK Boulevard crosswalk in the Indian Hills neighborhood of North Little Rock.
Montgomery, Keefe and Lorge are just a few of the men and women killed by vehicles in the Little Rock area in 2023. From 2018 to 2022, the Little Rock metropolitan area logged 136 pedestrian deaths — more than twice as many as the 62 in the previous five-year period from 2013 to 2017.
Those numbers make the Little Rock metro area the 10th most dangerous for pedestrians in the United States, according to a recent study. Worse still, the metro area showed the third-largest increase in average fatalities out of 101 cities nationwide.
The study was done by Smart Growth America (SGA), an urban planning nonprofit that focuses on transportation and pedestrian safety. Researchers analyzed pedestrian fatalities over five years (2018-2022) based on data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The total pedestrian deaths were then converted to annual averages per 100,000 residents.
The SGA study treats Little Rock, North Little Rock and Conway as a single metropolitan area, consistent with the federal government’s grouping of the cities into one Metropolitan Statistical Area. The Little Rock metro recorded 3.63 annual deaths per 100,000 people. The least-safe metro area for pedestrians was Memphis, which averaged 5.14 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 Memphians from 2018 to 2022.
The majority of the 136 deaths in the Little Rock area occurred on interstates, bypasses and Cantrell Road/Highway 10. This total represents a 119% increase in pedestrian deaths when compared to the previous five years — a measure the study calls “long term trend in fatality rate.” The only cities that performed worse than Little Rock on this metric were Memphis and Tucson, Arizona.
The least-safe cities for pedestrians tend to lack walkable infrastructure, according to Angie Schmitt, author of the book “Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America.” (Schmitt was not involved in the SGA study.)
“Unwalkable cities frequently top these lists,” said Schmitt, who has a master’s degree in city, community and regional planning. People in such cities who have few options other than walking must navigate impediments that place them in the path of vehicles, Schmitt said.
Demographics may also play a role in Little Rock’s poor showing. The metro area is nearly a quarter Black and just under 2% Latino. Overall, the study found Black pedestrians have a fatality rate twice that of white pedestrians, while Latino pedestrians have a 20% higher chance of dying than whites.
Similarly, the study found a correlation between income and pedestrian safety, with nearly a third of all pedestrian deaths occurring in census areas with an average annual income below $50,000. According to recent census data, 42% of people in the Little Rock metro have a household income below that threshold.
Schmitt gave a number of reasons why minority and poor pedestrians face more dangers. Systemic discrimination can manifest as dilapidated sidewalks (if there are sidewalks at all), a lack of good public transportation, and a lack of modern safety amenities designed to protect pedestrians. Another explanation will be familiar to anyone who has driven on Interstate 630 in Little Rock: Historically, Schmitt said wide roads, inhospitable to foot traffic, are often placed in poor and minority neighborhoods because residents don’t have the political capital to prevent it.
Looking for solutions
One way many larger cities are attempting to fix this problem is through a strategy called Vision Zero. First created in Sweden in the 1990s, Vision Zero offers a five-step plan for communities to “eliminate all traffic fatalities and severe injuries, while increasing safe, healthy, equitable mobility for all.”
Little Rock has adopted the Vision Zero approach, according to John Landosky, BikePed Coordinator for the Little Rock Public Works Department. Last month, the Little Rock Board of Directors authorized the adoption of the Central Arkansas Safety Action Plan and a Vision Zero policy. The stated goal of the policy is to reduce traffic deaths and serious injuries by 40% by 2040. What that plan will look like, however, is unclear.
“I don’t yet know whether or not there will be a separate Vision Zero plan or what elements that plan would entail,” Landosky said. “I believe the intention is to use the Central Arkansas Safety Action Plan, just released last week, as our Vision Zero Plan,” Landosky added.
Cities that are working to improve traffic safety can obtain federal funds, Schmitt said. For example, the U.S. Department of Transportation offers grants under its Safe Streets and Roads for All (SSR4A) Grant Program. Little Rock city directors authorized the city last month to apply for money under the SSR4A program, Landosky said.
Little Rock has identified a number of priorities to increase pedestrian safety, according to Landosky. These include road diets (turning four-lane, undivided roads into roads with two through lanes and a turn lane), lane diets (making lanes narrower, which has been shown to reduce speeds naturally), slowing traffic with reduced speed limits where possible, improving dangerous arterial roads, targeting the streets known to be the most dangerous, limiting cul-de-sac usage in new developments, adding pedestrian crossings to arterial roads, and targeting low-income and disadvantaged communities for much-needed improvements.
Like Little Rock, Conway is also applying for SSR4A funds, according to city spokesperson Bobby Kelly. He noted several steps Conway has taken over the past five years to improve pedestrian safety. These include hiring a designated bike and pedestrian coordinator, putting “rapid rectangular flashing beacons” at multiple mid-block street crossings (with an emphasis on school zones), adding sidewalks where none existed, connecting existing sidewalks, and developing a city-wide pedestrian master plan.
Kelly said Conway is going to implement a Vision Zero plan as well, likely beginning in the fall. First, though, the city is updating its pedestrian and bicycle master plans “so they’re complete and up to date,” Kelly said.
In North Little Rock, the plan looks a little different. North Little Rock spokesperson Shara Hutchcraft said she was unaware of any Vision Zero plan or intent to apply for SSR4A funds.
Nevertheless, Hutchcraft said, North Little Rock is working to reduce pedestrian deaths. The city has increased the number of sidewalks throughout the city, expanded existing sidewalks and improved lighting to boost visibility during evening hours. The city has allocated funds for these efforts in all wards of North Little Rock, said Hutchcraft.
While all three cities say they are working to increase pedestrian safety, Conway and North Little Rock were quick to note that the bulk of the fatalities referenced in the SGA study did not occur in those two cities.
“We pulled stats from reports for 2018-2022,” Hutchcraft said. “Of the 136 fatalities you reported in the metro area, it appears 12 were in NLR.” Kelly said Conway saw only five pedestrian deaths from 2018 through 2022, three of which occurred on roads that are owned and managed by the state.
An American problem
While the Little Rock metro saw one of the largest increases in the SGA study, pedestrian deaths are on the rise across the country. Of the 50 most dangerous cities, only three showed decreases in deaths from 2013-2017 to 2018-2022. Of the 101 metro areas examined in the study, just 18 showed a decrease over the same period.
After falling steadily from 2005 through 2014, the U.S. has seen deaths from road accidents increase almost yearly over the past decade, according to The New York Times. But the opposite has happened in most other developed nations.
Take France, for example. According to the Urban Institute, from the late 1970s through 1994, France and the U.S. both had roughly 150 annual deaths from road accidents per million people. In the mid-90s, France’s rate began to fall precipitously, and that downward trend has continued to the present. In 2002, then-president Jacques Chirac made reducing traffic fatalities one of his top three national priorities. France now has roughly half as many annual pedestrian deaths per capita as the U.S.
Yonah Freemark, one of the researchers on the Urban Institute study, told The New York Times that the disparity comes down to priorities: As cars grew safer for the people inside them, many countries began to prioritize the safety of people outside of cars. The U.S. did not.
“Other countries started to take seriously pedestrian and cyclist injuries in the 2000s — and started making that a priority in both vehicle design and street design — in a way that has never been committed to in the United States,” Freemark said.
The focus on pedestrian safety led to different policy and planning decisions in European countries, Freemark said, from lowered speed limits to the use of roundabouts rather than traditional intersections. It also prompted vehicle standards that prioritize pedestrian safety, such as requirements that car hoods and other crumple zones be made safer for pedestrians in the event of a collision. In 2010, based on recommendations from the United Nations, the European Union introduced new safety standards designed to reduce pedestrian fatalities and injuries.
Compare those efforts with the U.S.. From the 1970s through the 1990s, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration studied pedestrian-safety regulations, then failed to act upon any of them, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Today the federal government’s safety rating system assigns nearly every new vehicle a four- or five-star safety rating because the system does not account for how unsafe a vehicle might be for pedestrians. (NHTSA officials recently said they might consider adding pedestrian safety to the rating system in the future.)
With the lack of a coherent, effective national effort to reduce pedestrian fatalities in the U.S. — and with states generally failing to take steps to increase safety or reduce deaths — the task of decreasing the number of pedestrian deaths in America’s cities increasingly falls to cities themselves. A sort of laboratory of traffic safety, to paraphrase Louis Brandeis.
City officials in Central Arkansas appear to be taking the problem seriously, but they face challenges. Among them: Those making decisions are often working from assumptions that aren’t supported by the data.
In North Little Rock, for instance, Hutchcraft attributed the rise in pedestrian fatalities to one thing: increased use of cell phones and social media while driving. That appears logical at first glance — people drifting out of their lanes while texting at highway speeds seems as common in Little Rock these days as potholes — but that’s not what people studying the issue have found, according to Schmitt.
Of course, texting and cell phone distractions are “common and dangerous,” Schmitt said, but “we haven’t seen the same sort of increase [in pedestrian deaths] in a lot of other countries with high smartphone penetration.” Schmitt says the ever-increasing size of trucks and SUVs in the U.S. is a much bigger cause of the increased fatalities. (Some studies seem to bear this out.)
Given the limits on municipal powers in Arkansas and the populace’s predilection for large trucks and SUVs, it’s unlikely that Little Rock, North Little Rock or Conway are going to be able to do anything about vehicle size any time soon. Whether the other measures the cities are taking will be enough to decrease pedestrian fatalities remains to be seen.