Pedestrians involved in traffic crashes, Baltimore City represents 32% !!!

While Baltimore appears to represent a disproportionately high share of the pedestrian-involved crashes, it's also the only one of the entities in the list which is entirely urban. If you scale the fatalities against population, Baltimore only has ~17% of the total. Why do Somerset and Caroline have almost no pedestrian crashes? Because they have no pedestrians! Population density obviously makes a difference. If you scale the fatality against population density per square mile, Baltimore drops to the middle of the pack, and Baltimore and Worcester Counties are at the top. I'm not saying that this is necessarily a statistically legitimate calculation to make, but my point is that it's misleading to say "Baltimore is responsible for a third of all pedestrian fatalities in MD" without considering that Baltimore also contains an enormous share of all pedestrian trips in the state.

That being said, of course we need to work to reduce pedestrian-involved crashes and fatalities in Baltimore and everywhere else, and drivers who run red lights are a huge issue here. I just don't like seeing that data presented without any context.

My calculations referenced above are based on 2009 estimate at http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/mdglance.html. I would post them and link but it was done pretty down-and-dirty on a laptop that isn't mine so it's just not in a presentable format. If anyone wants to see them I can make them available at a later time.

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Looking at 2006 population numbers (just because I have them handy) Baltimore City has 11% of the State's population with 32% of the ped crashes, that's very disproportionate.

Montgomery: 17% of population and 15% of ped crashes.
Prince George's: 15% of population and 15% of ped crashes.
Baltimore County: 14% of the population and 15% of the ped crashes.

If totally urban is valid we should also see some significant over representation in mostly urban counties, which we don't. In fact Montgomery County where they do pedestrian crosswalk stings we see a slight reduction and in Baltimore County where they ticket j-walkers a slight increase.

My personal thought is traffic enforcement in the city is a joke, 10 officers are assigned traffic duty, 5 during the day and 5 at night and that's it.

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