- Pedestrian deaths in the U.S. are at its highest point in the last 40 years.
- Residents in major U.S. cities such as Charlotte, Atlanta, and Salt Lake City want local governments to help improve public transportation and areas for walking or biking.
- Advocates face huge obstacles to creating more walkable and transit-friendly communities due to funding challenges.
On the weekend in March when Brittany Glover would have turned 34, her mother stood on the same busy road in Atlanta where her daughter died six months earlier.
Glover, a flight attendant with a passion for clothes, was coming from an entertainment venue during the early morning of Sept. 19, 2022. She had lived in Atlanta for only 48 hours when she was hit by a driver while crossing Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway, which elected officials and activists call one of the most dangerous streets in the city. The driver fled and hasn’t been identified.
“Brittany didn’t have to die,” her mother Valerie Handy-Carey said, surrounded by friends and supporters as speeding cars whizzed by. Atlanta, she said, needs to do more to protect pedestrians and cyclists.
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She’s far from alone in her call to action.
With pedestrian deaths in the U.S. at their highest in four decades, citizens across the nation are urging lawmakers to break from transportation spending focused on car culture. From Salt Lake City to Charlotte, North Carolina, frustrated residents are pushing for increased funding for public transportation and improvements that make it safer to travel by bike or on foot.
“We already hit the point of diminishing returns,” said Roby Greenwald, a public health professor at Georgia State University. “We’re going to have to examine other transportation modes that make that easier or else we’re just going to have to deal with increased congestion, increased traffic fatalities and increased air pollution emissions.”
Nationwide, the number of…
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