Dark highways, fast cars, few sidewalks—and more pedestrian deaths

This story was originally published by Stateline.

Bianca Quintana was just taking a walk in the early morning dark near her mother’s house on South Coors Boulevard. There, the city streets of Albuquerque, New Mexico, give way to feed stores and irrigation ditches, and the sounds of chickens and crickets mingle with high-speed traffic noise.

Quintana, a 31-year-old mother of two, liked to walk to stay in shape for softball, her passion, and for her job as an Albuquerque police officer.

On Aug. 14, her mother found her lifeless body and the bright, police-issued flashlight she used for work, set to flashing to draw attention. Quintana might have tried to cross the highway, possibly to avoid weeds or a snake in her path, her mother and sister think, when a hit-and-run driver took her life. There are no sidewalks or streetlights nearby and the “boulevard” is really a four-lane highway with 55 mph speed limits and cars often going much faster. Police are still looking for the driver.

In some ways, the tragedy is typical of pedestrian deaths at a time when they have dropped nationally but are still higher than before the pandemic. Pedestrians die at the highest rates not in brightly lit big cities where sidewalks are crowded with office workers, but in Western and Southern rural areas and small cities where poverty forces more people to walk on dark highways with inadequate sidewalks or shoulders.

New Mexico has the highest rate as a state at 6.1 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 residents as of 2023. The state also led the nation before the pandemic; its rate was 4.7 in 2019, according to a Stateline analysis.

And across the country, the 33 counties with the highest rates—each with more than twice the national rate of 2.5 pedestrian deaths per 100,000—are mostly in the South and West.

Many big cities, including Los Angeles, Phoenix and Houston, have higher numbers of pedestrian deaths, but lower rates per resident. The numbers are based on a Stateline analysis of preliminary death records kept by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

More Deaths on ‘Stroads’

Julian Padilla, a transportation planner for the Mid-Region Council of Governments in New Mexico that includes Bernalillo County, calls roads like Coors Boulevard “stroads”—balancing the incompatible roles of streets with foot traffic and roads meant to push cars through as fast as possible.

Stroads, he said, can be urban as well as rural, as with Albuquerque’s historic Route 66, which runs through the city as Central Avenue and claims an outsize share of pedestrian deaths.

“These thoroughfares are the worst for the drivers and the worst for pedestrians,” Padilla said. “Drivers aren’t expecting to see pedestrians, and pedestrians aren’t expecting the speed of the cars and might perceive it incorrectly, especially in the dark, when most of these accidents happen.”

The fast-driving and rule-skirting motorist habits since the COVID-19 pandemic have drawn plenty of attention nationally. State and local officials are working to prevent pedestrian deaths with solutions such as brighter lighting, crosswalks with automatic flashing signs and “road diets” that cut down the number of traffic lanes.

Nationwide, the number of pedestrian deaths dropped last year after three straight years of increases, but the overall numbers are still 14% higher than 2019’s figures, according to a recent Governors Highway Safety Association report. The report was based on preliminary information from state highway safety offices.

From the Stateline analysis of death records, more than three-fourths of the counties with the highest rates from 2018 to 2023 have persistently high poverty rates above 20%.

Poverty also marks many of the areas within counties where most deaths occur. In Bernalillo County’s South Valley area, where Quintana’s mother lives, the poverty rate is about 21%. And in census tracts in Albuquerque’s International District, a neglected stretch of the old U.S. Route 66 meant for interstate travel, the rate tops out at almost 60%.

‘More Likely to be Walking’

Advocates for safer streets say poverty is a known risk factor in pedestrian deaths, as people without cars often get around on foot and must contend with speeding cars on dark arterial roads at night.

Rural Washington County, Mississippi, with a poverty rate of 29%, has one of the highest pedestrian death rates at 9.6 per 100,000 residents through last year. The county has seen even more tragedies this year, including an 18-year-old college student who died on a road at 3:45 a.m. in April, and a 36-year-old woman who was killed on a highway at about 5:50 a.m. in July.

“This has been extremely tragic, and we’re all shocked. This weighs heavy on us,” said Carl McGee, president of the Washington County Board of Supervisors. “It seems people are walking late on these roads and they’re not being seen by drivers. We’re meeting to go over ways of making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

Florida has three counties, all considered high poverty, among those with the highest pedestrian fatality rates: Suwannee County, west of Jacksonville; Escambia County, in the panhandle near the Alabama border; and Putnam County, southwest of St. Augustine. A state pedestrian safety improvement plan, begun in 2021 in the city of Pensacola in Escambia County, added mid-block lighted crosswalks and lowered the speed limit from 35 to 30 mph on 2.2 miles of busy West Cervantes Street where pedestrian deaths are common.

Fatality rates are five times higher for low-income neighborhoods compared with high-income neighborhoods, according to a report this year from Smart Growth America, which follows pedestrian fatality trends. And death rates increase as incomes drop.

“People with lower incomes are more likely to be walking, and walking in the most dangerous areas,” the report concludes.

McKinley County, New Mexico, has the highest rate in the state and the third highest in the country at about 18 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 population. McKinley—like the others in the top three, Oglala Lakota County in South Dakota and Apache County in Arizona—has large numbers of people walking and hitchhiking on highways.

In McKinley, a state project will add more lighting and crosswalks to U.S. Route 491, a route often used to reach communities in Arizona, Colorado and northern New Mexico. It will also add fencing and barriers to I-40 to deter pedestrians from crossing the high-speed highway as a shortcut to a local shopping center, said Luke Smith, an engineer with the New Mexico Department of Transportation.

“Improving pedestrian safety is one of the main driving factors in our design,” Smith said. The $16.4 million project, which includes other roadwork, is in the design phase and scheduled to start in 2027.

Even in urban areas of New Mexico, experts say, roadways built solely for cars can become death traps when low-income residents must cross them to get to neighbors and stores. An example is Albuquerque’s International District.

The road is six lanes but has little traffic, and the old motels that once beckoned to tourists along Route 66 have fallen down, leaving only ghostly, faded signs, or are used as shelters for the unhoused residents who often sleep on the neighborhood’s streets. The area has about 5% of the city’s population but more than 20% of its pedestrian fatalities, according to the University of New Mexico’s Geospatial and Population Studies department, a state-funded research group that analyzes pedestrian fatalities.

“That’s the problem with our Western roads in general, is they were never meant for foot traffic,” said Jessica Bloom, a research scientist in the department.

The International District has been slow to draw attention because so many residents are poor and unhoused, said Christopher Ramirez, director of Together for Brothers, a statewide advocacy group supporting boys and young men of color.

“We’ve created a place in Albuquerque where people experiencing homelessness are congregating, but we haven’t seen the resources yet to make sure people can be safely on the streets,” Ramirez said.

The city of Albuquerque plans to implement more pedestrian safety measures that have worked well on other, more gentrified parts of Central Avenue, such as Nob Hill. There, three lanes of traffic have been condensed to one as a so-called road diet, with a bus-only lane and a dedicated bike path filling out the roadway, said Valerie Hermanson, coordinator for Albuquerque’s Vision Zero program. Vision Zero is an international strategy to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries that many American cities have adopted.

With only one lane of cars, pedestrians should be able to cross more safely, especially with new crosswalks that flash warning lights as pedestrians cross.

Among plans for the area: using artificial intelligence to detect pedestrians about to step into the street that would then warn drivers with flashing lights, and more lighting on sidewalks to help walkers navigate and make them more visible.

Streetlights for Cars, Not Pedestrians

West of Albuquerque on Coors Boulevard, where Quintana died, there were 29 pedestrian fatalities from 2018 to 2022, the latest available numbers from the federal Fatality Analysis Reporting System based on police reports.

An $8 million state project is planned to improve pedestrian safety with lower speed limits, new sidewalks, raised medians, crosswalks and lights on Coors Boulevard. But it ends almost 4 miles north of Quintana’s mother’s house, limited to an area with chain stores, gas stations and restaurants that make pedestrian safety more pressing.

A Mid-Region Council of Governments report stressed the importance of better lighting and sidewalks on rural high-speed roads as well as on Central Avenue in Albuquerque.

“Unfortunately, the lighting infrastructure that is available along the street tends to be geared towards vehicular traffic and does not provide adequate lighting for other modes of travel,” the group’s report, approved in August, concluded. Lighting more geared to pedestrian needs “would make a great impact on reducing fatalities.”

Quintana’s sister Maricruz Dominguez and her mother, Maria Dominguez, made a roadside memorial for her, as is traditional in Hispanic cultures. Known as “descansos,” or “resting places,” in New Mexico, they are protected under state law, which prohibits damaging them.

For Quintana, the memorial includes a metal cross with the inscription “Mother, Daughter, Sister, Auntie & Friend,” flowers and balloons, and a yellow softball inscribed with her softball team number, 22, and “We love you B!” There are benches for visitors.

“The kids just don’t know how to process this yet. We’re taking it day by day,” said Maricruz Dominguez. “The only light here is way down the street, and why do cars have to go so fast here? I’ve flown through here at 70. I’m not innocent. But I don’t see why the speed has to be so high.”