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Halloween is a scary night to be a pedestrian

Halloween is a scary night to be a pedestrian

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More pedestrians die on the road on Halloween, a new study says

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Halloween is a dangerous time to be a pedestrian. Here in the United States, more people die from getting hit by a car on Halloween than on, say, your average Wednesday in October, new research says.

How many more pedestrians die on Halloween? About 43 percent more than on other, random, autumn nights, according to a study published today in the journal JAMA Pediatrics. That adds up to about four additional pedestrian deaths on October 31st every year. The increase is a tragedy, and signals to experts that we need better traffic infrastructure to keep pedestrians safe.

Sadly, some of the things that make the holiday delightful also make it dangerous. The evenings get dark earlier, creating a spooky vibe, but also reducing visibility on the road. Kids rush from home to home trick-or-treating, sometimes darting out into the road in their excitement. Adults who are out at bars or parties having fun of their own might get behind the wheel when they shouldn’t.

The study started last year when researchers John Staples and Candace Yip at the University of British Columbia were walking back from a talk and saw posters advertising Halloween-themed parties at bars. “Combined with earlier evenings, and lots of trick-or-treating, [it] had us curious about the influence that had on pedestrian risks,” Staples says. So the team dug through a grim dataset: 42 years of deaths on the road across the United States starting in 1975, tracked by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System.

“The streets should be safe for kids to celebrate a holiday.”

The research team compared pedestrian deaths from 5PM right up until midnight on Halloween to deaths during that same time window one week earlier, and one week later. They found that over these Halloweens from 1975 to 2016, a total of 608 pedestrians died — a 43 percent increase compared to random fall nights. Perhaps their most devastating finding was that 55 of those deaths were children ages 4 to 8. That’s 10 times more kids who died from being hit by a car on Halloween evenings, peaking around 6PM on Halloween nights.

While four additional deaths might seem like a small number in a country with a population of 325.7 million, any non-zero number of preventable deaths is too many. For the researchers, pedestrian deaths on Halloween are a sign that the roads still aren’t safe enough, no matter what night it is. “Halloween only occurs one night a year, and the other 364 days a year, a huge number of Americans are killed or injured in collisions between vehicles and pedestrians,” Staples says.

In fact, another study suggests pedestrian deaths have been on the rise since 2009, according to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, or IIHS. Overall, car crashes killed nearly 6,000 pedestrians in 2016. The good news is that’s a 20 percent decrease compared to 1975; the bad news is that’s a 46 percent increase since 2009, the IIHS study says. Most of the crashes occurred in the dark, and SUVs are playing a growing part in them, the study says. There are more SUVs on the road, and they’re higher off the ground — putting them at the right height to hit a pedestrian in the head or chest, the IIHS says.

So what do we do? The answer isn’t to ban trick-or-treating, Staples says, although he suggests incorporating lights and reflectors into kids’ Halloween costumes so that they’re visible to drivers. Instead, he thinks this should be a wake-up call to think about ways to make roads safer for the people who aren’t in cars. That means building sidewalks, making sure crosswalks are visible and well-lit, and preventing people from speeding or driving while intoxicated.

True, more kids out in the dark on Halloween mean more kids are likely to get hit by a car. But that’s a sign something’s wrong with our transportation infrastructure, Staples says: “The kind of world I want to live in is one where kids can make that choice and do so safely. The streets should be safe for kids to celebrate a holiday.”