There is a tension inside Louisiana’s most recent traffic safety data that deserves a closer look.
Overall, things are improving. The Louisiana Highway Safety Commission reported that 753 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in 2024, a 7.2% decrease from 2023 — a faster decline than the national rate of 3.8%. Motorcycle deaths hit an all-time low. Drunk driving fatalities dropped 18.3%.
And yet, pedestrian deaths went up. The report shows 161 pedestrians were killed in 2024, compared to 147 in 2023. Cyclist deaths increased too, from 35 to 44.
When a state makes measurable progress on almost every traffic safety metric and still sees more pedestrians dying, is that a coincidence? Or a road design problem?
Nearly 40,000 People Die on U.S. Roads Every Year
To understand Louisiana’s pedestrian crisis, it helps to know the national context it sits inside. According to final data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), 39,254 people were killed in motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2024. That’s a 4.3% decrease from 2023 — but it is still dramatically higher than pre-pandemic levels, and it represents a death toll that the Road to Zero Coalition — the nation’s largest traffic safety alliance — has set a goal of eliminating entirely by 2050.
Twenty-four more years. That’s how long safety advocates believe it will take to fix the underlying conditions that make American roads this deadly. For pedestrians and cyclists in Louisiana who are walking those roads right now, that’s not a comforting idea.
The Hidden Logic of Road Design
The reason pedestrian deaths remain elevated — in Louisiana and nationally — is not primarily about driver behavior. It is about how roads are designed.
For most of the 20th century, traffic engineers operated under a doctrine that treated speed and throughput as the twin pillars of road design. Wider lanes reduce friction and increase capacity. Generous turning radii allow vehicles to enter and exit without slowing significantly. The logic sounds safe. In practice, it produces roads that invite speeds far beyond posted limits.
A central mechanism behind this is something called the 85th percentile speed — a methodology that set speed limits not based on what is safe, but based on the speed at or below which 85% of drivers naturally travel. The National Transportation Safety Board concluded in a 2017 report that this approach is based on dated research and may not be valid. More critically, it creates a self-reinforcing cycle: roads built for speed produce fast drivers, fast drivers raise the 85th percentile, and the speed limit follows upward.
The result is what urban planners call a “stroad” — a road-street hybrid designed to move high volumes of traffic quickly through areas where people also live, shop, and walk. These roads do neither job well: the wide lanes and high design speeds generate crashes, while the commercial activity along their margins ensures someone is always on foot nearby.
Vehicle Speed is What Determines Who Survives
The stakes of road design are not abstract. Research cited by the Federal Highway Administration puts it plainly: a pedestrian struck at 20 mph faces less than a 10% chance of dying. At 40 mph, it reaches 85%.
That difference — between a crash that someone walks away from and one that kills them — often comes down to a few feet of lane width, the presence or absence of a planted median, or whether the curb at a corner was designed for a delivery truck at speed or a vehicle that must slow to turn.
Those are engineering choices. They are made by agencies and officials who have access to decades of research on exactly how deadly the consequences are.
Progress Is Possible But Requires Deliberate Redesign
Cities that have redesigned streets around safety rather than throughput have seen dramatic results. These changes are commonly called Road Diets: narrowing lanes, adding medians, installing raised crosswalks, and tightening turning radii. Oslo recorded zero pedestrian and cyclist deaths in 2019. Helsinki recorded zero traffic deaths in 2025. Many U.S. cities are now implementing similar approaches.
The barrier, as the Road to Zero Coalition’s research consistently shows, has never been technical knowledge. It has been a persistent cultural belief — embedded in engineering standards, funding formulas, and political expectations — that moving cars quickly is the primary purpose of a road. Until that belief is challenged in the design process, speed will continue to take precedence over safety.
In Louisiana, the statewide trend is moving in the right direction. But pedestrians are still dying at higher rates. The gap between those two facts is where accountability lives.
If you or a loved one has been injured in a pedestrian accident and you wish to discuss the specifics of your case in a free consultation with an experienced personal injury lawyer, please contact us today.