Every two years, Smart Growth America and the National Complete Streets Coalition release a report called Dangerous by Design, ranking the deadliest metro areas in the country for people on foot. The latest edition, covering data through 2024, puts Memphis at the very top of the list. It’s the second report in a row to do so, and it’s the highest pedestrian fatality rate the study has ever recorded.
The Numbers
Memphis’s pedestrian fatality rate now stands at 5.5 deaths per 100,000 residents. Between 2020 and 2024, that added up to 369 pedestrian deaths in the Memphis metro area, a sharp jump from the 221 deaths recorded in the previous five-year period. Put another way, Memphis went from averaging 44 pedestrian deaths a year to averaging 74, even as the region’s population didn’t grow anywhere near that fast.
This isn’t just a local problem, and it isn’t only a Memphis story. Nationally, 7,080 people were struck and killed while walking in 2024, the most recent year with complete federal data — a 72% increase since 2009. Even with small year-over-year declines the last two years, more than 80% of the 101 metro areas studied in this year’s report have grown more dangerous over time, not less. Of the handful of cities that managed to improve their long-term numbers in the last report, most couldn’t hold onto that progress this time around.
Memphis has now held the number one spot for a decade of these rankings. That’s not a statistical fluke, it’s a pattern.
Where It’s Happening
Reports like this can feel abstract until they point to a specific place, and this one does. Researchers flagged the intersection of Jackson Avenue and Hollywood Street as the site of repeated pedestrian deaths, pointing to a familiar set of design problems: wide travel lanes that encourage speeding, frequent driveways that create unpredictable conflict points, and long crossing distances that leave people exposed in the roadway far longer than they should be. The recommended fix wasn’t complicated, shorter driveways, better crosswalks, more space for people walking, and street trees to narrow the visual width of the road and naturally slow traffic.
That’s the throughline of this whole report: these deaths aren’t random, and they aren’t unavoidable. They’re the predictable result of how streets are built.
Proof That Redesign Works
Memphis isn’t starting from zero. National Street is one example researchers pointed to directly, a corridor that once carried fast-moving traffic through four lanes next to a school now has a grassy median, a park, and a mixed-use path where people can walk and bike safely. It’s a small stretch of road, but it’s proof that when Memphis chooses to redesign a street around safety, the difference is real and visible.
The problem is scale. One redesigned corridor doesn’t change a citywide ranking. It takes sustained investment and political will to turn examples like National Street into the norm rather than the exception.
Why This Is William’s Walk’s Fight Too
We know better than most families that these numbers aren’t abstract. They’re neighbors, kids walking home from school, people crossing the street to catch a bus. William’s Walk exists because one of those numbers was our son. That’s why we care as much about safer street design as we do about safer, better-trained drivers. Both sides of this problem, how roads are built and how people are taught to drive on them, have to improve together.
Smart Growth America put it plainly in this year’s report: small year-over-year improvements shouldn’t be mistaken for the problem being solved. We agree. A slight dip from a historic high is not the same thing as Memphis being safe for the people who walk through it every day.
What You Can Do
Pay attention to how your own neighborhood streets are designed, and speak up when a dangerous intersection near you needs a redesign. City and county officials do listen when residents raise these issues consistently. And if you want to support the work William’s Walk is doing on the driver-training side of this equation, Steps to Steering: 901 is a direct way to help.
This is only one piece of a bigger story we’ll keep telling this fall, including a closer look next month at exactly why Memphis’s roads are built the way they are, and what safer streets could look like here.
Learn more about William’s Walk at Williams-walk.com.