Common Causes of Pedestrian Accidents
Pedestrian crashes are not spread evenly across the map; most occur on fast roads, in dark hours, and on the stretches of pavement between intersections, not at random points along a route.
Most pedestrian deaths (60%) occur on high-capacity urban roads, often with speed limits of 45-55 mph.
These wide arterial roads in urban areas carry heavy traffic at highway-like speeds, yet people still cross them on foot to reach homes, stores, and transit stops.
The same danger reaches lower-speed settings drivers wrongly treat as safe, including parking lots where vehicles reverse without looking and school zones where reduced limits are ignored.
With designated crosswalks often spaced far apart, people cross mid-block instead, stepping into the path of a driver who is not expecting anyone in the road.
Away from designated crosswalks, a driver has no signal to slow down, and a person on foot has little protection.
Nearly three-quarters of pedestrian fatalities happen at non-intersection locations.
The federal numbers tell the same story, since around 65% of pedestrian deaths occurred on arterial roadways, the wide, multilane city streets built to move cars fast rather than to keep people on foot safe.
The road sets the stage, but it is rarely the legal cause of a crash.
The primary causes almost always trace back to a driver who failed at one of the basic duties the law imposes behind the wheel.
Driver Failure to Yield the Right of Way
A driver’s failure to yield the right-of-way is one of the most frequent causes of pedestrian accidents, particularly in marked or unmarked crosswalks.
Drivers have a legal duty to yield to pedestrians in marked or unmarked crosswalks, and failure to do so can result in liability for any resulting accidents.
Many drivers wrongly assume a crosswalk exists only where paint marks the pavement, when the law in fact recognizes an unmarked crosswalk at most intersections where sidewalks meet, so a pedestrian in a marked crosswalk and one in an unmarked crosswalk are owed the same duty to yield.
The danger sharpens during turns, when a driver’s attention splits between watching for a gap in oncoming traffic and completing the maneuver.
A failure to yield most often happens in a few recurring situations:
- Left turns: Drivers making left hand turns roll through the crossing, and cars turning left strike pedestrians who had every right to be in the street.
- Right turns: Right-turning drivers look left for traffic and accelerate into a crossing without checking for nearby pedestrians on the right.
- Lane changes: A driver making unsafe lane changes near a curb can force pedestrians to react with no warning.
In each scenario the failure to yield converts a routine crossing into a serious injury, and these are among the primary causes that establish a driver’s fault and liability under the traffic laws that require drivers to yield.
Speeding and Aggressive Driving
Speed decides whether a pedestrian crash is survivable, since a person struck at 20 miles per hour will usually live while a person struck at 40 often will not.
Speeding and aggressive driving significantly increase the severity of injuries in pedestrian accidents, with even a 10 mph increase in speed potentially leading to fatal outcomes.
A faster vehicle covers more distance before the driver can react, so at higher speeds the harder impact turns what might have been a broken bone into the kind of catastrophic injury a pedestrian rarely survives.
Speeding is a major factor in many pedestrian accidents on the wide arterial roads where most pedestrian crashes happen, a major contributor to fatal outcomes regardless of the vehicle type involved, and the reason reduced limits exist in school zones in the first place.
When a speeding driver strikes a person on foot, that violation often supports a negligence claim directly, since a pedestrian hit at speed suffers far worse than in the ordinary traffic crashes between two vehicles.
Speed remains a major problem for pedestrian safety, and exceeding the limit is a clear breach of the traffic laws meant to protect everyone using the road.
Poor Visibility and Nighttime Crashes
Darkness is the condition most strongly linked to fatal pedestrian crashes, for the simple reason that a driver cannot yield to a person they never saw.
Roughly 76% of pedestrian fatalities occur at night.
So many pedestrian deaths occurred after dark because reduced visibility makes every other risk on the road harder for a driver to manage.
Poor visibility conditions, such as nighttime driving, bad weather, and glare from the sun, are common factors that contribute to pedestrian accidents, as they reduce a driver’s ability to see pedestrians.
A significant number of accidents occur at night, in fog, or during rain, often exacerbated by a lack of street lighting.
Environmental factors such as bad weather, including rain, fog, or snow, can impair visibility and increase the likelihood of pedestrian accidents.
Low visibility does not excuse a driver, since the law expects a person behind the wheel to slow down and exercise extra caution, and a driver who fails to be extra cautious and holds full speed through rain, fog, or an unlit road commits a form of negligence when a pedestrian is struck.
The absence of a sidewalk is just as dangerous, since it forces pedestrians walking to share the roadway with traffic, and these infrastructure failures rarely shift legal responsibility away from a negligent driver, though a government entity that ignored known hazards may share liability.
Distracted Driving
A driver looking at a phone is not looking at the road, and a pedestrian can cross into and out of that blind window in the time it takes to read a text.
Distracted driving is defined as any activity that diverts attention from driving, including texting, using a smartphone, eating, or interacting with a vehicle’s infotainment system.
Drivers who are distracted by smartphones are significantly more likely to injure pedestrians, highlighting the dangers of mobile device usage while driving.
This is why so many crashes occur when distracted drivers strike people in crosswalks where they had a clear duty to stop, and distracted drivers account for many pedestrian injuries that a watchful driver would have avoided entirely.
The rise in pedestrian fatalities in the United States, which increased by 27% from 2007 to 2016, is partly attributed to distracted driving among other factors.
While distracted pedestrians also bear some risk when they step into the street while looking at a screen, the far greater danger comes from a multi-ton vehicle guided by a driver who is not watching where it is going.
Impaired Driving
Alcohol and drugs attack exactly the abilities a driver needs to avoid a person on foot.
Driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs dramatically slows a driver’s reaction time, impairs their judgment, and reduces their coordination, making it much harder to track moving objects like pedestrians.
Impaired drivers are more likely to engage in dangerous behaviors, which increases the risk of striking pedestrians.
An impaired driver speeds, drifts, runs red lights, and misjudges distances, and these several factors each raise the odds of a fatal encounter with a pedestrian.
If a driver is charged with a DUI after causing an accident, this criminal case is separate from any civil injury claim, but the evidence from the DUI case can support claims of negligence in the civil case.
A criminal DUI charge and a civil injury claim move on separate tracks, yet the breath test, field sobriety results, and police findings gathered in the criminal case often become powerful evidence of negligence in the civil claim.
One-third of all fatal pedestrian accidents involve a pedestrian with a blood alcohol concentration (BAC) level of at least 0.08%, indicating that impaired pedestrians are also at risk.
A pedestrian who has been drinking may misjudge a gap in traffic or step off a curb at the wrong moment, which can affect how fault is divided, though it rarely erases a driver’s responsibility entirely.
How Liability Is Determined in Pedestrian Accident Claims
A pedestrian accident claim turns on negligence, meaning the injured person must show that a driver owed a duty of care, broke it, and caused the harm that followed.
In many states, including Wisconsin, the principle of modified comparative negligence applies, meaning that a pedestrian may still recover damages even if they are found partially at fault for an accident, as long as their fault does not exceed a certain threshold.
Under that rule, a pedestrian who crossed outside a crosswalk or stepped into traffic may be assigned a share of fault, and a jury weighs many factors, including the lighting, the speed, and who had the right of way, before settling on a percentage.
That percentage reduces the recovery, and it bars compensation entirely only once the pedestrian’s share crosses the state’s threshold.
A pedestrian accident attorney examines the police report, traffic signals, witness statements, and physical evidence to press the driver’s share of fault and protect the injured person’s right to recover compensation.
While most pedestrian crashes involve a single passenger vehicle, some involve a commercial vehicle, and a crash caused by a truck driver can bring an employer’s insurance and federal safety rules into the claim.
Whether the vehicle was a car or operated by a truck driver, the analysis returns to the same traffic laws that define how a driver must behave around people on foot.
