As fitness-conscious Americans have learned, walking is a very healthy exercise which can greatly extend your life. But the sad fact is that walking also can be dangerous, especially on or near streets and roads. Too many Americans are at great risk — and even die — from walking, and Houston is one of the worst cities for pedestrian accidents.

A recent Transportation for America study puts Houston among the 10 most dangerous U.S. cities for walking. Houston, Sugar Land and Baytown, in fact, ranked collectively as eighth in the T for A survey. Worst for walkers was Orlando/Kissimmee, FLA. That’s also spring-training home of the Houston Astros, who can’t get a break but at least are used to dodging traffic (which is how the now Los Angeles Dodgers got their name while still in Brookly, NY).

To use another baseball metaphor, pedestrians too often are subject to hits, runs and errors by bad drivers. Increasingly, drivers today consider operating a heavy motor vehicle in intense traffic as secondary to placing needless cell phone calls and texts while behind the wheel. Making matters worse, many car and truck drivers traditionally don’t notice smaller motorcycles– much less pedestrians — anyway. Do walkers, then, face double jeopardy? You do the math.

Even more galling is the fact that America’s obesity crisis is prompting more people to walk and exercise to improve their lives — yet they’re increasingly at risk from motorists while doing so. Walking should be healthy, not deadly.

A coalition of primarily non-profit organizations which presses for national initiatives to improve America’s car-centric transportation system, Transportation for America reports that 76,000 Americans have been killed while crossing or walking near streets in the past 15 years. The group believes most of these “accidents” were, in fact, preventable, and attribute them to road systems which are dangerous by design.

Too many streets and thoroughfares were designed strictly for speeding cars, and make little if any concession to the very real fact that people on foot, on bicycles or in wheelchairs also must cross them, or at least proceed alongside them. Failing to factor this into a street’s design leads to deadly car accidents and pedestrian accident fatalities.

How bad were those numbers again? Consider this: In just the past decade, more than 43,000 Americans on foot have died in a vehicle-pedestrian accident. In perspective, that’s the equivalent of a jumbo jet full of passengers crashing every month for the past decade. Yet individual pedestrian deaths every day get little media coverage or public attention.

Transportation for America believes it’s time to change that — and so does Jim S. Adler & Associates. The longtime Texas personal injury law firm has represented many victims of auto-pedestrian accidents for decades, and it supports efforts to improve our transportation system in order to decrease if not eliminate such tragedies.

Let your city council representative know that you endorse retrofitting Houston’s roads and streets to make them more safe for people on foot, on bicycles or in wheelchairs. Otherwise, Houston will remain  on Transportation for America’s list of the 10 worst pedestrian cities, where it’s the only Texas city on the list.

That list takes into account that some cities, such as Houston, have fewer pedestrians than others. If such cities still have a high rate of pedestrian fatalities, that makes it worse.

This is why Orlando is worst of all. That city has only 1.3 per cent of residents who walk to work, yet it suffers 2.9 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people. Thus, those who do walk in Orlando are at far greater risk of dying than those in cities where more walkers are on streets.

Check out T for A’s website at the link above for more information. And if you or a loved one is unfortunate enough to be harmed in an auto-pedestrian accident, alert a pedestrian accident lawyer with Jim S. Adler & Associates. Americans need not only better designed streets, but also justice.

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