On behalf of Shea & Shea – A Professional Law Corporation posted in motor vehicle accidents on Sunday, January 13, 2019.
Residents in California know that they enjoy relatively mild temperatures and weather all year long. This makes it more pleasant to be out on foot more regularly than in other parts of the country. However, there can be a serious risk of being hit by vehicles for pedestrians even in daylight hours as well as when the sun has gone down.
In some situations, motorists even fail to stop after hitting pedestrians, such as in the case of a woman who was killed in a hit-and-run accident the week before Christmas in San Jose. ABC 7 News said the woman died after being transported to a hospital.
Records from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that the number of pedestrian fatalities in Santa Clara County has dropped in the last two years but there are still too many people on foot dying after behing hit by vehicles. There were 36 pedestrian deaths in the county in 2015, 34 in 2016 and then 25 in 2017. Data for 2018 is not yet available. Even though the 25 deaths in 2017 were less than prior years, they still represented more than 23 percent of the county’s total vehicular fatalities.
In San Francisco, there were a total of 25 people killed in auto accidents in 2017 and of those, pedestrians accounted for 15. That is a total of 60 percent of all deaths. In 2016, pedestrians made up more than 47 percent of all people who died in crashes in San Francisco. In Alameda County, 24 out of 99 people killed in 2017 were pedestrians. The prior year, 22 out of 79 fatalities were pedestrians.