When I was walking in Memphis....
this post was submitted on 13 Jun 2026
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Is this what Marc Cohn meant about walking in memphis
As a born and bred former native of Albuquerque, seems correct.
Sad to see so many people romanticize the US city infrastructure and using it as an example on what cities should look and not an example on how they shouldn't.
I'm shocked Tampa is not #1 on this list anymore, how can it be even worse than here? I don't know anyone who doesn't know someone killed by a car hitting them. Eternal vigilance on foot or bike; stop and look at EVERY intersection even if you have the right of way.
Maybe we just have more non-lethal strikes. I have been hit at slow speed twice, not injured, by cars turning right while looking left. Now I hit them with my hand to get their attention.
My brother was hit by a car while riding a bike three separate times in the Tampa/St Pete area. His back and spine are all fucked up.
I wont even visit the US anymore, let alone Memphis.
I feel cars above a certain size shouldn't be equipped with seatbelts and airbags. Be dangerous, live dangerous.
Even bigger, the driver airbag becomes spikes.
If I don’t need a seatbelt on a bus, you don’t need one for your Hummer. Fantastic idea!
I'm not sure that ~~0.00006%~~ 0.006% of a city population dying as pedestrians means "don't visit."
What about 0.006%, as suggested by the post?
Oof, yeah, I forgot to covert my multiplier to a proper percent. Thanks.
If a single person gets hit by a car in my city everyone is talking about it. Let alone 36
Okay. That doesn't mean I shouldn't visit other places.
Those numbers strike me as very low
Each bar covers 4 years. Are the X axis values per year or total?
As written it should be total.
I'm pretty sure more people than that die while driving and texting.
Probably because so few people actually walk in North America.
Yes, more Americans die from cars while inside of them than outside of them, due simply to the percentage of us who are inside of them. For most of these cities, there probably aren't even 100K people walking outside.
This proves that one shouldn't trust Marc Cohn.
Genuinely shocked that no Texas cities made the list.
Hmm maybe it's temperature related
It's not like there are many pedestrians in Minnesota in November. Places where it is warm year round would correspondingly have foot traffic year round.
You'd be surprised. I biked to work almost all of November last year because we didn't get snow until the very end of the month, and after that I walked a lot and took the bus lol.
I'd rather walk here in winter than anywhere in August back in Florida.
In 2019, Minneapolis reported 16% of all trips into or out of the city were made on foot. In the same year, the Memphis Metropolitan Planning Organization reported 1.02% of commutes were done either walking or biking in Shelby County (the county containing Memphis). Commutes vs. all trips and 150 km2 city vs 2000km2 county, so it's not a perfect comparison by any means, but I don't think that data is indicative of a massive bias towards pedestrian activity in Memphis vs Minneapolis. Weather is not a strong indicator for pedestrian activity, infrastructure is. But infrastructure has a correlation with safety, so we don't see high pedestrian modal share cities like New York, Chicago, or Boston on this list, but it has nothing to do with how cold their winters are
driving with all the windows closed, AC blasting, dark tinted windows to block sunlight... seems reasonable to think the climate could have an impact.
You dont see any northern States in the list, although, the list is short.
Bizarre how bad so many CA cities are when CA is such a wealthy, educated state. You'd think we would fix these problems.
Not familiar with Riverside, but Fresno and Bakersfield are both pretty damn poor and considered the “armpit” and “asshole” of CA respectively.
I found that strange too. But I guess a lot of cities are so unwalkable there are no pedestrians. I think this data should be % of pedestrians hit by cars or something
Below a certain threshold, being a pedestrian is less a lifestyle choice and more the only way to get around. A lot of those cities have high poverty rates.
I was wondering how cities that are so terrible people just don’t walk them factors into it.
Honestly, a more walkable city might have more pedestrian deaths, just because more pedestrians means more chances for a pedestrian to be killed.
Yeah; I think this data is biased to only include places with a decent pedestrian culture
I wonder how it correlates with municipal spending per capita on public safety and walkability infrastructure. Lot of underfunded, red-state cities on that list; I imagine Republican cities in CA might similarly underfund their safety infrastructure.
I think that's part of it but it's also partly the legacy built environment. California leaned harder into auto-centric infrastructure than maybe anywhere else in the entire world. That's starting to change but rebuilding an entire transportation system takes time.
Especially when public funds are scarce. Prop 13 does have a part here since tax increases generally require a supermajority of voter approval to be implemented.
Even here in Sacramento (we're #20 on this list I believe) improvements have been slow despite there not being a single republican leader on the city council in recent memory. But they still won't put real funding into solving these things, instead focusing on symbolic improvements that don't address the problem.
That makes sense. I'm not familiar with CA policy specifically but in the southeast, all cities (at least, the ones I'm familiar with) have in common:
- most constituents already have cars (or limited access to transport).
- constituents who must walk are much less likely to vote (for related and unrelated reasons).
- Fixing transportation infrastructure is actually hard, and expensive, and it takes forever, and it often goes wrong, so it's political safer to just continually complain about it than to spend one's capital on actually addressing the problem.
Yeah spot on here too I think. We do have a light rail but its reach is limited, most people live in spaced out suburbs, and the mode share is overwhelmingly car dominated.
The density issue is really hard to fix. There's been so much conversation and debate about a new light rail line and even as a public transit advocate I have to wonder if it makes sense when you're serving such a spread out population. The number of people within walking distance of the stations is so low when it's just single-story houses on 1/4 acre lots as far as the eye can see.
That's why I'd rather focus on transforming the urban core into a really great car-lite destination. This is more physically and economically viable, but the issue is most voters in the suburbs won't like this because it makes it harder for them to access. Our metro area is so huge that cars are really the only practical way to cover that distance, so I think we need to build more urban town centers in every suburb. But they won't want to do so unless they can see a successful example, which they're currently blocking. It's a thorny issue.
Maybe if blue suede became fashionable again.