The Latest Bleak Evidence That Crossing the Street Is Hazardous to Your Health

We stumble across a lot of depressing studies and stories at Cities about your chances as a pedestrian or cyclist of getting side-swiped by a passing car (in a bike lane, on a sidewalk, passing through an intersection). Today, though, just feels like a pile-on. First up, we have an alarming study out of New York City summarized in this morning's New York Times with this succinct conclusion:

That research, from the NYU Langone Medical Center, looked at 1,400 pedestrians and cyclists who were treated at Bellevue Hospital Center after suffering a collision. Forty-four percent of the pedestrians injured on the street (to distinguish them from the handful who were injured on a sidewalk) were using a crosswalk with the signal in their favor, suggesting that there wasn't much else they could be expected do to keep out the cross-hairs of car traffic. In contrast, 23 percent of the injured pedestrians were trying to cross the street mid-block, while only 9 percent admitted to crossing at an intersection against the signal.