The number of pedestrians killed on Colorado streets reached an all-time high last year, painting a grim picture of traffic safety, a year after the state recorded the largest number of road deaths in more than four decades.
While traffic deaths saw a slight dip last year, the picture isn’t getting any brighter for those traveling by foot or bike.
Data from the Colorado Department of Transportation shows the number of cyclist deaths jumped by 33% last year to 20, up from 15 in 2022, and the number of pedestrians killed on Colorado’s streets reached a new high.
Colorado saw a significant uptick in pedestrian deaths in 2020 when 93 people were killed while walking along or across the state’s streets compared with 76 in 2019, and the number has continued to rise. Last year, at least 131 pedestrians were killed — an overwhelming majority of them at night.
“A lot of people die just moving from point A to point B,” said Pete Piccolo, executive director of the advocacy group Bicycle Colorado. “And it seems as though unless you’re impacted by traffic violence, it’s almost normalized.”
“The fact that 12,982 people died in Colorado (since 2002) going to school, going to work, going to the grocery store, it is really an unbelievable thing that we cannot figure out how to move around our communities without killing each other,” Piccolo said.
Preliminary data shows that last year, 712 people were killed on Colorado’s roads, including 20 cyclists, 134 motorcyclists and scooter riders and more than 300 drivers. (In 2022, 764 people were killed in traffic crashes.)
The causes aren’t easy to identify and there are several theories to explain how driver and pedestrian behaviors, road design and vehicle size all fit together.
While rising pedestrian deaths match a nationwide trend, it isn’t one that has occurred in other countries of comparable wealth, where pedestrian and cyclist deaths have generally been declining, not rising. The number of pedestrians killed by drivers in the U.S. has been climbing for more than a decade and in 2022, they reached a 40-year high when more than 7,500 pedestrians were killed.
The Colorado Sun parsed last year’s data on traffic deaths and spoke to experts about the numbers. Here’s what we found:
More than 2 in 3 pedestrians were killed last year between sunset and sunrise
In Colorado last year, 67% of pedestrians died while walking across or along the road in the dark, data from CDOT shows.
The data shows that of the people who died at night, 65 were in areas with streetlights and 16 were in areas that had no lights at all.
“A lot of times you’ll have street lights, but not necessarily a really visible crosswalk,” said Annelies Van Vonno, CDOT’s bicycle and pedestrian planning coordinator.
(Since crash data from 2023 is still being evaluated, final data could vary. Officials expect the year’s total number of traffic crashes to represent a 5% decrease from 2022, a spokesman said.)
The pedestrians who were killed included three people age 10 and younger and eight people between the ages of 11 and 20.
More than three-quarters of the pedestrians killed were male and all but one of the cyclists killed on Colorado’s roads were male, preliminary data shows.
“(Men) are overwhelmingly represented as both victims and offenders in traffic crashes,” said Sam Cole, CDOT’s safety communications manager. “They tend to be young. And what do we know about young men? They tend to be risk-takers.”
Research also shows that more men tend to bike compared to women and men could have the tendency to walk more often at night compared to women, Van Vonno said.
Cycling deaths are on the rise
After three consecutive years without an increase in cyclist deaths, the number of people killed while riding a bike in Colorado jumped to 20 last year.
Among the bicyclists killed in 2023 were 13-year-old Liam Stewart, who was struck by a car while riding his bike to his middle school in Littleton, and 17-year-old Magnus White, who was training for the upcoming world championships in Scotland when he was struck near Boulder by a driver who fell asleep and drifted from her lane.
Colorado’s growing population could be contributing to the rise in traffic deaths with more people on foot, bike, electric scooters and vehicles sharing the road, said Piccolo, with Bicycle Colorado.
Five times the number of cyclists died in 2023 compared with 2003, when three cyclists were killed. The state’s population has also soared in the past two decades with census data swelling to 5.8 million in 2023 from 4.5 million in 2003.
“We’ve got a lot more cars, a lot more people on bikes, a lot more people on foot and one-wheeled scooters, within this essentially the same built environment,” Piccolo said.
Generally, data shows that more deaths happen in urban areas, with more cars and bikes on the roads and more people walking or biking to public transportation, and a higher number of commuters are killed compared to recreational riders, Piccolo said.
But in the end, the deaths don’t discriminate.
“It is everyone,” Piccolo said of the demographics. “At the end of the day, it is young and old. It is rural and urban, it is a commuter and recreational rider. It has impacted everyone now.”
Lawmakers this year are considering two bills intended to make Colorado’s roads safer for cyclists.
It’s currently illegal in Colorado to text and drive. But Senate Bill 65, also known as the “hands-free bill,” would ban all cellphone use while driving, unless drivers are using a hands-free device. Current law only prohibits drivers under the age of 18 from using a cellphone while driving.
Senate Bill 36 would provide transportation funding for bike lanes, pedestrian walkways and crosswalk lighting, among other safety improvements, by imposing a small fee for each driver during registration in Colorado’s 12 most populous counties —calculated based on a vehicle’s weight.
Senate Bill 65 has been introduced in prior years and failed to pass, Piccolo said.
“This is one public health crisis where we know what the solutions are,” he said. “So the challenge isn’t figuring out what to do, the challenge is finding the will to implement them.”
The highest number of pedestrian deaths happened in urban, more populated areas
Denver saw the highest number of pedestrian fatalities with 24, followed by 15 in Adams County, and 14 in El Paso County, data shows.
Urban arterial roads are overwhelmingly the most dangerous for pedestrians because of the high speed of cars and the extended exposure for pedestrians before reaching the other side, Van Vonno said.
“When you have to cross six or eight lanes of traffic, it just takes a longer time,” she said.
Arterial roads are designed similarly to highways, but with more cross streets, and often have a limited number of crosswalks.
“If it’s gonna take you a quarter-mile, half a mile to walk to the nearest crosswalk, you might just take your chances in traffic and try to dash across the road,” Van Vonno said.
While it’s hard to pinpoint exactly what causes each crash, distracted driving is a growing concern, Colorado State Patrol Master Trooper Gary Cutler said.
A recent report from The Schiller Kessler Group, a Florida-based law group, which used data from the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, shows that Colorado has the highest number of pedestrian deaths occurring at intersections in the country.
Of the 433 pedestrian deaths recorded in Colorado between 2017 and 2021, 138 were at intersections, accounting for nearly 32% of pedestrian deaths, data shows. (Nationwide, pedestrian deaths occur at intersections 17% of the time, according to NHTSA data.)
Last year, Colorado State Patrol recorded 36 pedestrians or bikers who were struck, but not necessarily killed. Twenty-five of those crashes were a result of a driver failing to yield to a pedestrian at a crosswalk and three collisions happened at a crosswalk where there were flashing lights, Cutler said. Three bikers were hit when a driver failed to yield to a cyclist in a bike lane.
“I believe we’re just getting as a society that we’re trying to push the limits of what we should be doing on the roadways and trying to get there faster and quicker and it’s not safe to do that,” Cutler said.
Smartphones and the distractions they offer both drivers and pedestrians could be playing a huge factor in traffic fatalities, especially in the U.S. where the ubiquity of automatic transmissions frees up a driver’s hands for other uses.
A CDOT survey in 2022 found that more than half of drivers in Colorado use their phone while driving.
The New York Times reported that Americans spend nearly three times as much time interacting with their phones while driving compared to drivers in Britain, according to data collected by Cambridge Mobile Telematics, a company that tracks dangerous driving. The data showed that distracted driving in the U.S. — detected when phones are tapped or in motion in vehicles traveling faster than 9 mph — typically peaks in the evening hours, the Times reported.
Experts say bigger cars on the road could also play a factor, though car sales haven’t dramatically changed in the last few years.
“As cars have gotten bigger, longer, taller, heavier, they’re hitting pedestrians and bicyclists with more force,” Van Vonno said. “The heavier a car is, the longer it takes to stop that car. Brakes are slower when you have a heavier vehicle and you have a lot of vehicles nowadays that have a very tall hood and instead of hitting a person at the leg or knee level, it’s hitting people in the chest.”
In 2023, the most registered car in Colorado was a Ford F-150, followed by the Chevrolet Silverado, two massive trucks with high front ends, according to data from the Division of Motor Vehicles.
The best-selling car nationwide in 1990 was a Honda Accord, a much smaller sedan.
“At the end of the day, when a car and a bike come into conflict, it’s the pedestrian who’s going to lose,” she said. “A person in a car might be safe, but you might kill somebody and I don’t think anyone wants to be responsible for that.”
226 people were killed in an impairment-related crash
Impairment-related crashes were down last year compared with 2022, but still 226 people lost their lives.
“There’s not a soul in the U.S. that doesn’t know if you get behind the wheel (while impaired) that you could end up killing somebody. So getting behind the wheel, knowing that information, is selfish, it’s careless and reckless,” Cutler said.
A variety of factors could contribute to the dip in traffic fatalities in 2023, Cutler said, including increased technology in newer cars that reminds drivers to fasten their seatbelts.
Enforcement is also up, with a team of state troopers stationed in parts of the state to target impaired driving and various campaigns to warn against dangerous driving behaviors, including aggressive driving, he said.
For safer roads, drivers need to stop thinking about pedestrians and cyclists as an afterthought, Cole with CDOT said.
“We need a wholesale shift in the way drivers think about safety and sharing the road,” Cole said. “Too many people drive without a consideration to the increasing number of roadway users out there.”
Charts by Danika Worthington.
