UNLV Expert: Here's How to Address Skyrocketing Pedestrian Fatalities (2024)

When Erin Breen convened a meeting at a local casino nearly a decade ago to discuss the issues of pedestrian safety plaguing Boulder Highway, she requested a room that could accommodate at least 20 people.

“I told them that I invited over 100 people, but that I’d be surprised if 25 showed up,” she recalled.

Needless to say, she was shocked when 87 local community members filed into the meeting room to discuss matters of life and death on what had become, in Breen’s estimation, one of the “meanest” streets in Southern Nevada.

“They sat on tables, they sat on the floor, they were out the door,” said Breen, director of the Road Equity Alliance with the Transportation Research Center at the UNLV College of Engineering. “I was incredibly heartened by how many people wanted to have a say in changing Boulder Highway for the better.”

The issues were numerous and the data stark. The auto-centric Boulder Highway accommodates — at its narrowest — a 200-feet right-of-way for cars, promoting “high vehicular speed and a low-reaction time,” resulting in higher numbers of fatal accidents and serious injuries. The roadway’s current configuration also discourages pedestrian use of crosswalks and impedes reliable transit access.

“It’s very unforgiving,” said Breen, a longtime advocate for vulnerable road users. Vulnerable road users are pedestrians, bicyclists, and others who are unprotected by an outside shield, like a car, according to the National Safety Council.

These issues, and more, are also present on other major roadways throughout the region, and have been contributing factors to rising pedestrian fatalities in Nevada, with 2024 being the worst year to date, according to Breen.

“Right now, for pedestrian fatalities, we’re where we were at the end of September last year. It’s been a really difficult year,” she said.

According to preliminary data from the Governors Highway Safety Association, there were 109 pedestrian traffic fatalities in 2023 in Nevada, up from 69 deaths in 2019.

But progress is on the horizon. Last month, Breen was there when the Henderson City Council officially accepted $170 million in federal funding for the Reimagine Boulder Highway project — a plan to rebuild the road into an urban corridor safe for all modes of travel.

“They’ve already been doing a lot, but they’re going to start moving dirt now,” Breen said. “It’s 20 years in the making, but it’s 10 years that I’ve been working on that project.”

We sat down with Breen, who has studied traffic safety issues and advocated for vulnerable road users for almost three decades, to learn where we’re at, where we’re going, and what it will take to make Southern Nevada roads safe for all users.

Pedestrian fatalities in Nevada are up compared to 2023. Why?

This has been an incredibly hard year. I focus on vulnerable road users, and this is the worst year we’ve ever had. People ask me all the time, “Why, what’s the reason?”

Self-involved drivers is my No. 1 answer: People who care about only themselves and no one else. And the second thing would be our street system.

I think a lot of it has to deal with growth fatigue. We normally have a lot of street projects because we’re a young community. Everyone should see that as such a positive. But, when people can’t see the improvements that construction makes to their lives, they look at it as a negative.

The good news is that things are slowly starting to change.

What does traffic and pedestrian safety look like on a national level?

Since 2012, pedestrian fatalities have risen 77% nationwide. That’s astronomical. All other traffic fatalities have risen 22%. When you start looking at when the deaths are happening, it’s at night.

Dark streets are a part of the problem. I’m personally not a fan of the new LED lights because they shine really bright at the top of the streetlight, but they don’t hit the ground in the same way. More importantly, in more depressed areas with a higher population of vulnerable road users, there’s been issues with copper wire being stolen, so there’s no streetlights at all.

If I want drivers to learn anything, it’s this: Your headlights illuminate in front of your vehicle 150 feet on average. At 40 miles per hour, you travel 66 feet per second, and reaction time is 2.5 seconds. So, if people are counting on their headlights to tell them that there’s a vulnerable road user there, which includes both bicyclists and pedestrians, they’re wrong.

The good news is that, nationwide, pedestrian fatalities dropped 2% last year. We obviously need to do much better, and particularly in Nevada, given that we were not one of the states that saw a decline in 2023. Pedestrian deaths in Nevada are also on track to be up dramatically in 2024.

The Reimagine Boulder Highway Project is now underway. Are there any other road improvement projects happening in Southern Nevada that get you excited?

This week the (Regional Transportation Commision's)Maryland Parkway Bus Rapid Transit project starts. For our UNLV community, I want them to remember that the project will impact their commute, but the rewards of that project are going to be tremendous. It’s going to significantly improve the quality of life of everyone who lives in the area, and everybody who works in the area. It will be worth the short-term pain.

Another piece of good news is the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL). There’s billions of dollars available for transportation improvements, and Nevada has done a good job of getting some of that money and will continue to do so. Nationally, 56% of traffic fatalities were for people who were not in cars last year. But, if you look at the funding: less than 10% of funding goes to improvements for those who are not in cars. So, there’s that inequity and that needs to change. Right now, the momentum is to change that. Safe streets for all is the big program that came out of the BIL.

Stewart Avenue is one of the BIL projects that’s currently in the final stages of design. Stewart Avenue is typical of lots of streets in our community. A lot of people walk out of necessity. So, the person who walks for transportation is a completely different road user than a person who walks for exercise or recreation. If you’re a commuter, especially if you’re using transit, and you’re walking or biking your first or last mile, you’re trying to get somewhere on time, it makes you vulnerable to those human frailties of thinking only that ‘I have to catch that bus,’ not that ‘I could die crossing the street.’

We’ve done a bad job of building our roads for human beings. It’s my job to point that out to people and to build consensus on why we need to do better, and that it's possible to do better.

What are some streets in our community that model the ideal for traffic and pedestrian safety?

Downtown Las Vegas. Those are original Las Vegas streets and they were built for people; they weren’t built for cars. So, you’ll notice the blocks are shorter, the roads are narrower, the speeds are lower —those are forgiving streets. Narrower lanes make it less comfortable for a driver to go fast.

I use a picture of Bonneville between 3rd and 4th streets as an example in presentations, and I say this picture lowers my blood pressure 20 points.

Look at Main Street and Commerce within the City of Las Vegas: it is everything and more that we knew would happen if they redeveloped that street. They made the infrastructure so much safer. They brought that whole footprint back to life downtown. All the new business, all the new revenue, all the people who are there. It’s so exciting.

It can happen in other places in our town. I’ll be so happy when we have streets that are less stressful.

Any final thoughts?

Since the beginning of COVID, the two top contributors to fatalities in our community, every single month, are speed and impairment. Both of those are controlled by the person behind the wheel. Everyone is sure it will never be them until it is.

That’s where being in this injury prevention business is hard. Because I have the numbers of every person I feel we failed to reach. And the hard part is that we seldom hear about the people who we did reach.

“Don’t get behind the wheel impaired” is not a hard message. There are so many choices you can make in today’s world to not get behind the wheel impaired.

We all have to do our part. We all have to be responsible. We have to look out for the other guy no matter how they travel. It’s going to be your worst day, if you take a life, or cause someone to be paralyzed.