By Briant Novinska-Lois
Every year, resources are poured into counting and preventing pedestrian deaths. But because parking lots and driveways are classified as private property, fatal crashes involving people walking in these spaces are excluded from the national Fatality Analysis Reporting System. In 2021, that amounted to hundreds of people who died in off-street crashes. To state and local DOTs, the message is that these deaths don’t count toward the metrics that drive funding, planning, or design priorities, so the crashes themselves don’t need to be a priority either. The result is a system that is blind to about one in eight pedestrian deaths.
The need to address this reporting gap is becoming more urgent. Bloomberg reported that off-street parking environments have become increasingly lethal due to “car bloat,” as the popularity of larger, taller SUVs and trucks creates wider blind spots that make people walking, especially children, harder to see. More than 100 children are injured every week in driveway and parking lot crashes, many of them toddlers under three years old. And distracted driving, such as reaching for a phone or interacting with in-car controls, further increases the danger in these areas.
But this isn’t just a data problem; it’s also a values problem. Every metric tracked and published sends a message of what is worth solving, and right now, that message tells state and local DOTs that off-street deaths fall outside their job. But that message can be rewritten. Federally recognizing all pedestrian fatalities, which can be requested from states, would give state DOTs a mandate to act on it, such as pinpointing dangerous driveways and parking lot entrances that intersect with state-owned roads, building them into planning analyses, and redesigning or consolidating them to reduce hazards.
At the local level, considering off-street pedestrian deaths could provide more reason to eliminate outdated parking minimums. They don’t just add more driveways and entrances; these minimums force the construction of oversized lots built to move cars through spaces where people are walking in every direction, with little to no infrastructure that would normally slow drivers down. By considering the frequency of off-street pedestrian deaths, cities would have a data-backed argument for reducing the size and number of parking lots, removing the conditions that put drivers and people in constant conflict.
Crash prevention isn’t just what happens on the road; it’s also what happens where trips begin and end – in driveways and parking lots. A crash that kills someone in a parking lot is no less preventable than one on a public road. Adding these fatalities to the national record would give agencies the standardized benchmarks they need to direct funding and target dangerous sites, while also building the case for parking reform. Until off-street parking deaths are counted the same as on-street ones, the people most exposed to this danger – people walking, biking, and children – will remain the least protected by the systems meant to keep them safe.
Photo credit: Sami Abdullah via Pexels. License.