It’s Getting Riskier to Walk and Bike After Dark

The most disturbing thing about Halloween isn’t the fake blood, urban legends, or sexy clown costumes. It’s that the streets are full of actual child-killers: Pedestrians under age 18 are twice as likely to be struck and killed by a car on October 31 than on any other day of the year.

That statistic tends to only make the social-media rounds in the days immediately before the holiday, but it connects to a truly frightening year-round phenomenon. More U.S. pedestrians are dying in car crashes, and more of them are dying at night, according to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In 2018, 6,482 people were killed by drivers while they were on foot, a 3.4 percent jump from 2017. Cyclist fatalities also rose by 6.3 percent from 2017, with 859 killed. After a decade of uptick, both groups saw their highest death toll since 1990.