There Was No Crosswalk

Key findings

When a pedestrian is killed, the question usually asked is what the person was doing. The federal data invites a different one: what was there for them to use.

Of the 7,524 pedestrians killed in 2024, 5,983 died where no marked crosswalk was present. That is 79.5%. In 62.3% of cases there was no sidewalk either. And 75.2% died after dark.

The pattern is stable. In 2023 the equivalent figures were 79.2% with no crosswalk and 75.7% after dark, from 7,781 deaths.

A further 1,102 cyclists were killed in the same year. They are counted separately throughout and are never folded into the pedestrian totals.

The lighting finding is not the one people expect

Three quarters of these deaths happen in darkness, which is widely known. The detail that gets less attention is the split within it.

More pedestrians were killed on roads that were lit (2,998) than on roads that were not (2,495). The usual response to a night-time pedestrian death is to call for street lighting, and lighting is worth having. But these deaths are not concentrated on unlit roads. Most of them happened where the lights were already on.

Older pedestrians die differently

Splitting the no-crosswalk share by age produces the most uncomfortable finding in this analysis.

Among 15 to 24 year olds, 88.4% of those killed died away from any marked crossing. Among people aged 65 and over, that falls to 67.4%. Read the other way round: roughly a third of older pedestrians killed died inside a marked crosswalk, a far higher share than any younger group.

The likeliest explanation is behavioural rather than mysterious. Older pedestrians are the group most likely to walk to a marked crossing and use it. The finding is that doing so did not save them. Whatever protection a painted crossing offers, it is offering least to the people most inclined to rely on it.

State by state

Method

Source: the NHTSA Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) 2024 national file.

Pedestrian and cyclist records live in the FARS person-type file. Only records identified as pedestrians are counted here; cyclists are reported separately and never merged into the pedestrian totals.

Crosswalk and sidewalk presence come from the fields recording what infrastructure existed at the location. The dataset expresses absence as None Noted, meaning the reporting officer recorded no such feature. We treat that as absence, which is what it denotes, but the exact wording is quoted here so readers can weigh it themselves. Light condition comes from the crash record, joined on the combination of case number and state, because case numbers are not unique across states.

Age bands are calculated from the recorded pedestrian age. Records with an unknown age are excluded from the age breakdown but remain in every other total, which is why the age bands sum to slightly fewer than 7,524.

This analysis does not assign fault. FARS does not record who was responsible for a crash, and the absence of a crosswalk does not establish that anybody was negligent. A pedestrian may cross away from a marked crossing for many reasons, including that the nearest one is far away. What the data describes is the physical setting in which these deaths occurred.

Download and reuse

The state-level aggregate is available as a CSV: pedestrian-crossings-2024.csv.

These findings are free to republish, including the charts and the table, with attribution to Cash4Crashes and a link to this page. For a breakdown of a specific city, county or state, contact help@cash4crashes.com.

If you or a family member were hurt while walking, our guide to pedestrian accident claims covers how these cases work.

Cash4Crashes is a lead-generation service that connects people injured in crashes with attorneys in our network. We are not a law firm and nothing on this page is legal advice.