Protecting vulnerable road users starts before the crash

Not everyone on the road carries the same risk. A person walking, biking, riding a scooter or crossing with a cane has no airbag, no seatbelt, no steel around them. When a street is designed around the vehicle, the cost of that design lands on them first. Knowing where that happens, and why, is what turns a safety commitment into a project list.

Where the risk actually concentrates

Recent data suggests that pedestrian safety may be moving in the right direction, but the problem remains far from solved. The Governors Highway Safety Association (GHSA) projects that 6,732 pedestrians were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2025, a 7% decline from 2024 and the third straight year of decreases nationwide. Yet even with this progress, pedestrian fatalities remain 12.5% higher than they were in 2017, underscoring how much risk continues to be concentrated among people outside of vehicles.

The challenge is not simply about the number of people walking. It is about where and how transportation systems expose vulnerable road users to risk. GHSA’s analysis shows that pedestrians continue to experience disproportionately severe consequences when crashes occur, even as overall traffic fatalities have declined from their pandemic-era peak. Factors such as higher vehicle speeds, larger and heavier vehicles, nighttime visibility challenges, and roadway designs that prioritize vehicle throughput continue to increase the likelihood of serious or fatal outcomes for people walking.

Pedestrians are only one part of a broader vulnerable road user population that includes bicyclists, people using micromobility devices, people with disabilities, and road workers. While their travel patterns differ, they share a common reality: limited protection when interacting with motor vehicles. As communities invest in active transportation, complete streets, and other mobility options, ensuring these users can travel safely becomes increasingly important. The question is no longer whether more people will use these modes, but whether our transportation systems are evolving quickly enough to protect them.

Road workers face many of the same challenges as pedestrians: they operate in close proximity to moving traffic with little physical protection, making speed management, visibility, and proactive safety interventions critical components of a safe transportation system.

A risk shaped by the environment, not just the moment

It’s easy to view these crashes as isolated mistakes: a pedestrian stepped into the roadway or a driver looked away. But researchers and safety practitioners consistently find that risk is concentrated on a familiar type of roadway: wide, multi-lane arterials with higher speeds, longer crossing distances, and large volumes of traffic. These environments increase both the likelihood of a conflict and the severity of the outcome when one occurs.

That’s not simply a description of a distracted moment. It’s a description of a roadway. Multi-lane, high-speed, high-volume arterials, usually built to move cars through a place people also live in. The exposure is manufactured upstream, in geometry and speed environment, long before anyone steps off a curb.

This is precisely the gap Complete Streets policies exist to close, and why Vision Zero and the Safe System Approach reframe the question: “who made the error,” but “why did this environment cause a fatal error.”

Geography sharpens it further. Although pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities are concentrated in urban areas, rural roads experience a disproportionately high share of fatal crashes. Rural roads carry about 31% of U.S. vehicle travel but account for 41% of traffic deaths, and their fatality rate per mile traveled is nearly 50% higher than on urban roads. Higher operating speeds, forgiving-roadside challenges, and longer emergency response times can all increase crash severity once a collision occurs. Different environments create different failure modes, and different solutions.

Knowing where to act

The gap between a Vision Zero commitment and a Vision Zero result is prioritization. Every agency has more deficient locations than budget. The question is never whether a corridor could be safer. It’s which corridor returns the most safety per dollar, and in what sequence.

Crash data remains an essential foundation for understanding roadway safety, but it has limitations when used on its own. By nature, it is retrospective, often takes time to become available, and reflects locations where serious incidents have already occurred. As a result, corridors that share the same risk characteristics but have not yet experienced a fatal or serious injury crash may not stand out in a traditional crash analysis. Until they do.

Layering crash, behavioral, and roadway data reveals what any one dataset alone cannot: the corridors where interactions between road users are most frequent, the roadway characteristics that increase the likelihood of a collision, and the driving behaviors that make those collisions more severe. It transforms broad safety trends into a localized, operational view of risk—one that helps agencies identify where intervention may have the greatest impact.

Napa Valley Transportation Authority did exactly this, integrating crash data with years of driving behavior data to map the riskiest areas for vulnerable road users statewide.

How Michelin Safer Roads supports agencies

Michelin Mobility Intelligence helps transportation agencies and city leadership use data to understand and reduce vulnerable road user exposure across their networks. Risk Projection Maps surface elevated risk indicators from near real-time driving behavior, road features and movement patterns, so agencies can act on a location before it earns its place in the crash record.

That supports the decisions that actually move a Vision Zero action plan: network screening, prioritizing safety investments, adapting speed management strategy. And once the work is built, Before & After Analysis tells you whether it delivered, which is the part most programs still can’t answer.

Want to see where risk is hiding on your network? Book a demo to find out how Michelin Safer Roads can help.

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