Pedestrian Death Crisis Triggers New U.S. Safety Rules
To reduce fatalities and serious injuries among pedestrians struck by vehicles, the U.S. Department of Transportation has proposed a rule that would require new passenger vehicles be designed to reduce the risk of serious-to-fatal head injuries in child and adult pedestrian crashes. Another new rule mandates automatic emergency braking by 2029.

Miami, Florida resident Stephanie Figueredo died this week of head injuries after being hit by an SUV while walking with her mother, who was also hurt. Stephanie was seven years old.
Stephanie was pulled from under the wheels of the compact crossover SUV that ran her over on the afternoon of September 2, 2024 as she and her mother entered a local pharmacy.
The SUV was driven by a 92-year-old woman said Officer Michael Vega, a Miami police spokesman. The woman, whom police have not named, was trying to park her SUV when she accidentally pressed the gas pedal, thinking it was the brake, Vega said.
She remained at the scene, was cited in the incident for careless driving, and could face further charges.
Paramedics rushed the little girl to Ryder Trauma Center at Jackson Memorial Hospital where she fought for her life but passed away five days later.
Stephanie’s father Joany Figueredo told local TV reporters that he believes elderly people should not be allowed to drive. “Restrict people from driving at that age,” he said.
Ready With a New Rule
As if on cue, on the first business day following Stephanie’s death, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed its newest rule to better protect pedestrians – the most vulnerable people on the streets.
To reduce fatalities and serious injuries among pedestrians struck by vehicles, this rule would establish a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard, FMVSS No.228. New passenger vehicles would have to be designed to reduce the risk of serious-to-fatal head injuries in child and adult pedestrian crashes.
“We have a crisis of roadway deaths, and it’s even worse among vulnerable road users like pedestrians,” Sophie Shulman, NHTSA’s deputy administrator, said, introducing the new rule on Monday.
“Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities increased 57 percent from 4,779 to 7,522,” Shulman said. “This proposed rule will ensure that vehicles will be designed to protect those inside and outside from serious injury or death. We will continue to work to make our roads safer for everyone and help protect vulnerable road users.”
In 2021, drivers on U.S. roads struck and killed an estimated 7,485 people on foot – the most pedestrian deaths in a single year for 40 years and an average of 20 deaths every day, according to an estimate released in 2022 by the nonprofit Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA).
Pedestrian traffic deaths in the U.S. continued to rise the following year, with 7,522 pedestrians killed in 2022, another increase from the previous year and the highest fatality rate since 1981. Pedestrian injuries rose by 11 percent.
“This is heartbreaking and unacceptable. The pandemic has caused so much death and damage, it’s frustrating to see even more lives needlessly taken due to dangerous driving,” said then GHSA Executive Director Jonathan Adkins, who now is the organization’s CEO. “We must address the root causes of the pedestrian safety crisis – speeding and other dangerous driving behaviors, inadequate infrastructure, and roads designed for vehicle speed instead of safety – to reverse this trend and ensure people can walk safely.”
The rising traffic fatality figures were a loud wake-up call, and in response, the U.S. Department of Transportation adopted the comprehensive National Roadway Safety Strategy on January 27, 2022 “to bring the number of roadway deaths to the only acceptable number of deaths: zero,” the DOT said in a statement.
More than two years later on September 5, 2024, while Stephanie was in the hospital on life support, the NHSTA released its early estimates of traffic fatalities for the first half of 2024. It was good news.
Overall traffic deaths had declined for the ninth straight quarter. Traffic deaths were down, although vehicle miles traveled had increased, in both the first and second quarters of 2024. An estimated 18,720 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes during the first six months of 2024, 3.2 percent fewer than the 19,330 lives lost to crashes in the first half of 2023.
“REVERSING THE RISE IN ROADWAY DEATHS HAS BEEN A TOP PRIORITY FOR THIS DEPARTMENT, SO WE’RE ENCOURAGED TO SEE CONTINUED REDUCTIONS IN TRAFFI” FATALITIES – YET THE OVERALL PROPORTIONS OF THIS ISSUE REMAIN AT CRISIS LEVELS AND THERE IS MUCH MORE WORK TO DO,” – Pete Buttigieg, U.S. Transportation Secretary
“Safety is at the core of our mission, and we are using funds from the Biden-Harris infrastructure package to deliver lifesaving resources to communities across the country so that roads become safer for everyone,” Buttigeig said, announcing the new statistics.
Pedestrians at Greatest Risk
But while overall traffic fatality totals are coming down; pedestrian fatalities like Stephanie’s have not declined – they have increased continuously until just the past six months, when the trend appears to have turned.
On June 26, 2024, the Governors Highway Safety Association released its latest report showing that the five-year pedestrian death toll surpasses 35,000 as “dangerous driving, infrastructure shortfalls, larger vehicles contribute to perilous conditions for people walking.”
Drivers on U.S. roads struck and killed 7,318 people in 2023 – a large number but down by 5.4 percent from the year before, and 14.1 percent above the pre-pandemic level in 2019, the latest GHSA report shows.
“A DECLINE IN PEDESTRIAN DEATHS OFFERS HOPE THAT AFTER YEARS OF RISING FATALITIES A NEW TREND IS STARTING. EACH DEATH IS TRAGIC AND PREVENTABLE. WE KNOW HOW TO IMPROVE SAFETY FOR PEOPLE WALKING – MORE INFRASTRUCTURE, VEHICLES DESIGNED TO PROTECT PEOPLE WALKING, LOWER SPEEDS AND EQUITABLE TRAFFIC ENFORCEMENT. IT WILL TAKE ALL THIS, AND MORE, TO KEEP THE NUMBERS GOING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION.” — Jonathan Adkins, Chief Executive Officer, Governors’ Highway Safety Association
New Rule Demands Better Vehicle Design
In its newly proposed rule, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration addresses the issue of redesigning vehicles to protect pedestrians.
The rule would apply to passenger vehicles with a gross vehicle weight of 10,000 pounds or less, including multipurpose passenger vehicles such as trucks, SUVs, crossovers, vans and buses.
Data show that in 2022 deaths of pedestrians struck by the front of a vehicle were most common for multipurpose passenger vehicles (49 percent) followed by passenger cars (37 percent).
The newly proposed standard would establish test procedures simulating a head-to-hood impact and performance requirements to minimize the risk of head injury.
The test procedures include the use of a variety of human-like headforms from child to adult to measure the head-to-hood impact on diverse pedestrians.
The vehicles would have to reduce the risk of serious to fatal head injury to child and adult pedestrians in impacts at vehicle speeds up to 40 km/h (25 mph), which account for about 70 percent of pedestrian injuries from vehicle impacts. It is expected the standard would be beneficial even at higher speeds.
Additionally, the uniquely American vehicles, such as pickups and large SUVs, would have to provide the proposed level of pedestrian head protection. Pickups and large SUVs represented nearly a quarter of U.S. passenger vehicle sales in 2020.
The proposed rule meets a Bipartisan Infrastructure Law directive to harmonize U.S. vehicle regulations globally to promote vehicle safety. This standard, when finalized, would align with Global Technical Regulation No. 9 on Pedestrian Safety,
The new rule starts the process of integrating Global Technical Regulation No. 9 into the U.S. federal vehicle safety standards. NHTSA has collaborated with other governments internationally to develop GTR 9, and numerous countries have integrated the Global Technical Regulation with their own regulations.
Manufacturers Resist Pedestrian Automatic Emergency Braking
In April, NHTSA announced that nearly all new passenger cars and trucks sold in the United States must include automatic emergency braking systems by 2029.
These systems are designed to prevent or mitigate collisions with pedestrians by automatically stopping or slowing vehicles before impact.
The proposed pedestrian safety vehicle design rule is intended to work with the growth of automatic emergency braking (AEB) technologies. An AEB system uses sensor technologies and sub-systems that work together to detect when the vehicle is in a crash-imminent situation, to automatically apply the vehicle brakes if the driver has not done so, or to apply more braking force to supplement the driver’s braking, the rule states.
Some of the systems on the market now warn of, and respond to, an imminent collision with a pedestrian.
Pedestrian AEB (PAEB) systems are designed to stop the vehicle automatically before striking a pedestrian or reduce the speed at which an impact occurs if the vehicle’s initial speed is too high to avoid impact.
On May 9, 2024, NHTSA published a final rule requiring AEB and PAEB systems on light vehicles. This standard builds on a voluntary commitment by 20 vehicle makers to design AEB as a standard feature on light vehicles, though that commitment, announced by NHTSA in 2016, did not include PAEB.
“When new vehicles are equipped with PAEB, we anticipate that fewer pedestrians will be struck,” the National Highway Traffic Safety Association states. But a group representing major automakers has asked the NHTSA to reconsider the rule.
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, representing all major U.S. automakers except Tesla, said the requirement that all cars and trucks would be able to stop and avoid striking vehicles in front of them at up to 62 miles per hour is “practically impossible with available technology.”
The Alliance said NHTSA’s requirements at higher driving speeds will result in vehicles “automatically applying the brakes far in advance of what a typical driver and others on the road would expect” resulting in rear-end collisions.
Safety advocates say existing systems are not performing well and that new rules are needed to avoid more deadly crashes.
The Alliance maintains that the NHTSA “vastly underestimated the necessary and costly hardware and software change required for vehicles to comply.”
“NHTSA’s action will require more costly systems that won’t improve driver or pedestrian safety,” wrote the Alliance’s President and CEO John Bozzella in a letter to Congress and the NHTSA. “These are highly technical and engineering related objections. But they are significant.”
Sources: Statements from Pete Buttigieg, Sophie Shulman, Jonathan Adkins, John Bozzella, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, Governors Highway Safety Association, Alliance for Automotive Innovation, Miami Herald, Local 10 TV news, Global Technical Regulation No. 9 on Pedestrian Safety, Miami Police
Tags: automatic emergency braking, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, NHTSA, pedestrians, vehicle design, traffic accidents, traffic crashes, pedestrian deaths,
By Sunny Lewis, journalist, founder of Environment News Service (ENS) at: ens-newswire.com, and expert in the field of sustainable mobility in the United States and around the Pacific Rim.
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