Outside city limits, a quarter of pedestrian crashes happen in the dark with no street lights

Walking crashes, 2021–2026 (2026 so far). Found in 2021–2023 (26% vs 5.7%); held in 2024–2026 (21% vs 5.1%).

Outside city limits includes suburbs that are not part of a city, as well as rural roads. Taken with the first finding, these are the crashes that most often kill.

The share is within crashes: with no counts of how many people walk, ride or drive where, it can't say how likely a crash is for anyone.

A scan of the crash records found it in the earlier years, among thousands of patterns tested with a false-discovery control, and it held in the later years, which the scan never saw. A person then read it and checked it isn't an artefact of how crashes are recorded. The numbers above are recomputed from the data each time the site is rebuilt. All findings and the method

• People hit on foot in the dark with no street lights are killed about four times as often
• A crash with a person on foot on a freeway kills them more than a third of the time
• On roads posted 50 mph or more, a third of pedestrian crashes are fatal
• Even in a crosswalk at an intersection, crashes at night on a lit street are about three times as deadly