"75-year-old woman hit by vehicle in downtown Las Vegas" (Oct. 13, 2012)
"Woman critically injured in auto-pedestrian crash" (Aug. 10, 2012)
"Coroner IDs pedestrian killed on Tropicana Avenue" (Sep 4, 2012)
"Two killed in auto-ped accident at Las Vegas Boulevard and Robindale Road" (May 27, 2012)
"4 dead, 8 injured after car hits bus stop in Vegas" (Oct. 13, 2012)
A random smattering of headlines from the local media paints the tragic picture, with the last of these incidents deemed to be perhaps the worst in the city's history and sufficiently horrific to garner national media attention.
Those four deaths last month brought the number of pedestrians killed in traffic accidents in Las Vegas police jurisdiction to 83, with others having occurred since. While the most recent stats we came across pegged New York, L.A., Chicago, Phoenix, and Houston as the most dangerous cities in the U.S. for pedestrians, with Nevada not even making the Top 10 list of states for the same (which included Oklahoma, Mississippi, Georgia, Maryland, North Carolina, Hawaii, South Carolina, Arizona, Delaware, and Florida), the figures for 2012 here may be bad enough to change that.
The research department at Huntington Press receives every press release and headline-news story relating to Las Vegas throughout the day, and by a few months into the year we already knew empirically that something was wrong. Very wrong. It seemed every day brought news of another accident involving a pedestrian, usually fatal, and often with the victim being on a crosswalk or pavement (that wasn't the first bus-stop hit this year, we're sad to report).
Our sense of trouble predated but anticipated the Nevada Office of Traffic Safety's July report that 128 people had been killed statewide, representing a 9.4 percent increase on the same period in 2011. The figure for Clark County alone up a massive 61 percent for pedestrian deaths -- from 59 to 95.
Why?
That's a question that's been on many people's lips, especially as drunken driving traffic deaths conversely fell in Clark County for the first six months of 2012. So, the problem doesn't correlate with an increase in DUIs, although impaired driving still remains a major problem in Sin City.
One concrete change that occurred this year was the cell-phone ban for drivers, which kicked in Jan. 1. Intended to make driving and drivers safer, we wondered at the time it was implemented, when casualty-rates started to rise, whether in fact the new law was not making people text less, as intended, but rather text more dangerously, as they try to send and receive messages on the sly, while still at the wheel. It's a distinct possibility as a causal factor, if not the only one, although we don't have hard stats to prove it.
Just as the high fatality rate among drivers and passengers this year has often stemmed from lack of seat-belt use, some of the blame in pedestrian accidents must lie with the victims. For example, early in the year there was a spate of fatalities on the Strip and the I-15, as people repeatedly attempted to cross multiple lanes of fast-moving traffic, even after fellow pedestrians had died doing the same just weeks, or even days before. Pedestrian intoxication was a factor in more than one of these incidents, and we feel sorry for the drivers involved, who really can't be held to blame. (Seriously, who in their right mind tries to cross a freeway on foot, in the wee hours, especially here?)
A lot of accidents have involved pedestrians crossing roads outside of marked crosswalks, especially late at night or in the early hours. Again, that's just asking for trouble, especially when you consider that a lot of drivers are either DUI, or have just woken up to go to work, likely without enough sleep, or else have just clocked off after a long shift -- or some combination of the above.
With repeat accidents happening at the same spot, in some instances it's shone a light on particular intersections and stretches of road in an effort to determine whether their setup is funamentally flawed in some way. An article in the R-J over the summer, titled "Cars vs. People: Death toll on streets alarming", made the following observation:
"As Las Vegas sprawled outward, its roads were designed to move only cars - sometimes at the expense of pedestrian safety. Nowhere is that more apparent than on Boulder Highway, where intersections can be up to a mile apart and pedestrians clash with cars moving 45 to 55 mph - when they're not speeding."
The Las Vegas Strip shares a similar lack of crosswalks, tempting tourists to make a run for it, rather than schlep another block in the searing summer heat -- but it's a shortcut that could cost you your life.
Another potential causal factor for the dramatic uptick in accidents could be the economy, with the continuing rough job market meaning more people are walking rather than driving or riding to work in a city that doesn't do much to accommodate pedestrians, who in turn take risks because it's too darned hot to walk a mile to the crosswalk.
The problem on Boulder Highway, and other major roads, is that "drivers don't expect pedestrians," observed David Swallow, the RTC's director of engineering services capital projects in the same R-J piece. Recognizing the problem, RTC officials have revamped a 12-mile stretch of Sahara Avenue over the past two years to include more cues for drivers that pedestrians are around. These improvements include bus lanes, wider sidewalks with curbside trees, and median landscaping. A high-intensity-activated crosswalk, or HAWK, was test-driven on E. Sahara Ave. and apparently reduced the rate of jay-walking pedestrians from 1 in 3 to 1 in 11. "Now pedestrians are crossing in a place where drivers are expecting them and will yield to them," commented Swallow on the experiment, which will hopefully be extended, funds permitting.
There are certainly ways to make Las Vegas more pedestrian and bicycle-friendly, but they all cost money, and as Erin Breen, director of the Safe Community Partnership Program at UNLV put it, "We need to make sure pedestrians understand that just because they have the right of way, that doesn't mean magic spikes will come out of the road to stop a car."
