The Financial Costs of the Pedestrian Death Crisis Are Still Stratospheric

The financial burden of pedestrian deaths still adds up to tens of billions of dollars even as fatalities fall — and the organization behind the new finding hopes the staggering price of road violence will motivate people to finally take action.

Car drivers who killed U.S. walkers cost more than $40 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, according to a new estimate and analysis from the Governor’s Highway Safety Association. That’s despite a 10.9 percent drop in pedestrian fatalities compared to the same six months in 2024 — which was still too high to lower the totals below pre-pandemic levels. The association calculated that car drivers killed slightly more than 3,000 pedestrians between January and June of 2025.

“It’s mind boggling,” said Adam Snider, the Association’s director of communications. “It’s a humongous amount of money. To try to quantify human lives in that way is tragic, but it’s so important to show the impact of unsafe driving, particularly for pedestrians.”

Worse, that “$40 billion” figure is almost certainly an undercount.

Snider explained that GHSA’s analysis is based on National Highway Traffic Safety Administration formulas that include direct economic costs — such as medical care, legal costs, emergency services, and property damage — as well as indirect costs, like the value of the 18.7 years of “quality-of-life year” the average pedestrian loses when they’re killed before their time. But they don’t include mental healthcare costs, or the financial consequences that crash deaths impose on survivors who are left to pick up the pieces.

“Every pedestrian fatality is exceedingly traumatic,” he adds. “The people affected by it, the loved ones of the person killed; they never forget. There’s a severe, notable emotional trauma that that goes on with each of these deaths, and that is not captured in this $40 billion figure.”

Snider also underscored that while some of the estimated $40 billion might flow to sectors like the healthcare system, most of that money is simply lost because a person who would have otherwise participated in the economy prematurely perished. Furthermore, the families of traffic violence victims are unlikely to receive a financial windfall after their loved one is killed — even if they attempt to take their case to court or the state crime victim’s compensation fund.

“It’s exceedingly rare that victims of traffic crashes — or next of kin, in the case of a fatality — see much, if any, financial assistance,” he added. “I think it points to a severe imbalance in both the risk, but also the burden of a crash for a pedestrian versus a driver.”

Of course, there’s an opportunity cost to letting walkers die in such horrifying numbers, too —  especially when you consider the massive financial benefits that communities enjoy when they’re designed with pedestrian safety in mind.

Research shows that safe, walkable neighborhoods are more likely to report higher retail revenue, higher property values, more tourism, and a raft of other financial side effects that flow naturally from the kind of infrastructure and policies that protect human life.

To create the urgency necessary to actually build those walkable places, though, American transportation leaders will need to acknowledge the reality that we have a serious pedestrian death crisis — even if the statistics are trending slightly down from an already-unacceptable baseline.

On April 1, though, the NHTSA lauded its own official 2025 traffic fatality numbers as the “second-lowest traffic fatality rate in recorded history at 1.10 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled.” Safety experts have consistently argued that it is wildly misleading to measure deaths per mile in a country that already encourages and often requires excessive driving.

The federal agency also neglected to mention that those numbers were actually 1.5 percent higher than they were in 2019, before the pandemic upended national travel patterns, and it did not release comparable numbers about pedestrian deaths, which often don’t track with overall fatalities.

Still, Snider said it is encouraging that car crash deaths are going down — even if they’re not going down fast enough. And if framing the pedestrian death crisis in terms of its costs to the country’s economy can re-sensitize Americans to constant roadway slaughter, he’s more than willing to do it.

“We need to convince as many people as possible that there’s a pedestrian safety crisis in America, and [use] any data points we can to get that point across,” he added. “If talking about the financial cost helps convince more people that might not have thought there was a crisis going on, then I’d say that would be worth it … [Because] we still have so much farther to go. We cannot stop until no one is dying on our roads.”