Cell Phones Don’t Make Walking Dangerous — Car-Based Cities Do

All the hype about cell phone use being to blame for pedestrian deaths doesn’t hold up when you review the data. To get a sense of the real sources of risk for people on foot, it helps to look at where fatal crashes happen, because fatality rates have a very strong geographic component. That’s true both within cities — where fatalities tend to be concentrated on a relative small share of streets — and from city to city.

A new study from researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee finds huge disparities in the risk of walking and biking between different American cities. The likelihood of being killed is about five times higher in the most dangerous regions than in the safest ones.

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