Cincinnati and Dayton make streets safer by redesigning them and upping the speed humps
Pedestrian safety is deteriorating at a faster rate than road safety for other users, according to the World Health Organization. The agency has set a goal of decreasing deaths and injuries by 50 percent in five years. Speed humps and redesigned roads are among the top solutions and are gradually slowing people down.
The problem
According to 2023 National Highway Traffic Safety Administration statistics, every 72 minutes a pedestrian dies in a traffic crash. That totals 7,314. And over time the numbers don’t get any better. The Centers for Disease Control report from 2013-2022 pedestrian deaths increased by 50 percent while deaths in 27 other high-income countries declined a median of 25 percent.
Pedestrians have nine times the risk of death of people in a car. AAA says one in ten pedestrians dies after colliding with a vehicle going 23 miles an hour, but if that vehicle is going 32 miles an hour 25-percent are killed.
What has made walking and cycling so dangerous?
According to the World Health Organization (WHO):
- The growth of 4-wheel drive and SUVs.
- Autonomous braking relies on detection and detection of pedestrians isn’t very good.
- Increased use of e-bikes and scooters.
- Victim blaming is at its worst for pedestrians.
- The road system is not designed to accommodate visibility challenges for pedestrians.
Another problem is that cities combine roads (a transportation route to get from one place to another at a high rate of speed) and streets (designed for people to walk around freely and safely in an urban space). Strong Towns CEO Chuck Marohn coined the term “Stroads,”and says they’re deadly because they combine high speed with complexity.
“Drivers feel very comfortable. They feel like you’ve got their back in the design standpoint. And you’ve taken care of all the problems and conflicts and they drive faster. But in these environments where cars will randomly stop, randomly turn across traffic, where you have people walking, people biking, kids running out in the street after a kickball, all that, the kind of complexity that we see in human environments. That type of speed becomes deadly,” he says.
Marohn says cities need to fix this by doing the opposite of what they do with highways. Instead of widening, narrow the lanes, bring curbs to create edge friction and bring trees in to create vulnerability so the driver is more aware of the complexity.
Cincinnati and Dayton pedestrian statistics
According to the Cincinnati Crash Report Dashboard, there have been 218 traffic crashes involving pedestrians from 2021-2025, averaging about 50 pedestrians a year.
2022 data from Dayton shows six people were killed after being hit by a car. According to the Ohio State Patrol, in a live dashboard, there were 882 pedestrian-vehicle crashes in Montgomery County from January 1, 2020-September 1, 2025, the fourth highest county in the state. Hamilton County had 2,099 and was number three in Ohio.
In 2018 thirteen Cincinnati Public Schools students were hit by cars in a variety of different incidents.
Traffic Crashes involving Pedestrians from January 1, 2020 to September 1, 2025:
Source: Ohio State Patrol
Dayton Solutions
Dayton has an interesting challenge, re-engineering its streets for half the population it had in 1960. This excess road capacity encourages drivers to speed and causes accidents. Narrowing the streets with curb bump-outs and bike lanes is the plan. In this podcast, Brick by Brick’s Emiko Moore reports on how the city is going to do it.
Automated cameras can also improve road safety. The Dayton Daily News reports the Police Department has asked the City Commission to approve at least 64 speed cameras and 17 red light cameras. This follows testing of them in eleven school zones earlier this year.
What Cincinnati has done and its plan for the future
It was 2016 when Northside business owner Sarah Cole was hit and killed by a car when crossing Hamilton Avenue. But it didn’t end there. In 2023 a cyclist was critically injured on Colerain. In 2024 another pedestrian was hit in a marked crosswalk in Northside. That pedestrian, Anna Barchick-Suter lived to tell about it and now has a 3D-printed plate in her head.
These and other incidents spurred the city into finding solutions:
- Raised crosswalks-They slow cars down but also cost $20,000 each, mostly because of the drainage issues.
- Speed humps-The concrete ones cost $20,000 a lane and most streets have four lanes=$80,000. They are in sections to allow emergency vehicles to go fast over them.
- Curb bump-outs-They narrow the street to force drivers to slow down.
About a year and a half after Senior Planner Mel McVay was tasked with finding solutions she was hit by a car, making her more resolute in slowing vehicles down.
“So, what the data tells us is that the speed cushions (speed humps) are by far the most effective tool that we have in our traffic calming toolbox. We have seen reductions in speed up to 21 mph, which is huge,” according to McVay.
In Oakley before speed cushions were installed, 56-percent of drivers were speeding (in a 24-hour period). That dropped to 1-percent after the speed humps.
She’s now looking to install speed tables on major streets. They’re like a raised crosswalk, only in blacktop, across the entire road. They’re about $70,000 cheaper than speed cushions per each location.
Changes can’t come soon enough in Madisonville, especially at the dangerous intersection of Madison and Anderson Place where seniors used to cross to get groceries and kids would walk to school.
But with a fatality at that intersection people stopped using it and cross instead at the light one street down. With state funds the community will get a raised crosswalk at Madison and Anderson Place in 2027.
Madisonville Community Council Transportation Chair Kerry Devery also wanted more speed humps in his community. Because the neighborhood wasn’t very high on Cincinnati’s list, he had to do some out-of-the-box thinking.
Devery was able to use $500,000 of TIF (Tax Increment Financing) District funds to secure traffic calming on ten streets. The contract was signed in July and the speed humps should be in place in the summer of 2026.
What are the most dangerous areas for pedestrians where you live? Email us at brickbybrick@publicmediaconnect.org
Western Hills students say it’s a mindset
Grief from the 2018 death of one student-Gabby Rodriguez who was hit by a car, and the serious injuries of others in separate incidents, propelled Western Hills High School teacher Jeff Demaree to act. “My initial reaction was, as a dad, as a father of a child and I reacted paternally like this. This has got to stop.”
Cincinnati installed speed bumps on Glenway Avenue and also created curb extensions. Workers put up signs on Ferguson Avenue. In addition, the city invited students to pedestrian safety working groups.
But Demaree says the accidents kept happening and he wondered about ones not even reported. So, he and his students got to work. “As an educator, I knew the students were bright and capable of doing something and what we missed was a plan.”
His students did a safety audit and determined there weren’t enough crosswalks. In the meantime, they were invited to Columbus to meet with the Ohio Department of Transportation and then later to testify at the Statehouse.
We were there ourselves, literally fighting to get this changed and it’s still happening. At some point, it’s like, it can’t be just the lawmakers. It has to be a change of mind,” according to senior Antwan Blunt.
Demaree and other students agreed that in order to keep pedestrians safe, hearts and minds had to change. They started an awareness campaign with this billboard.
Senior Germiah Richardson says, “The billboard idea, it was meant to be something big, something anybody, everybody can see. You’ll drive by, you’ll see it. You look at your surroundings to make sure everything’s good, right? And then you look up and you’ll see a big billboard right there to raise awareness and then you’ll think twice.”
It briefly went up near Western Hills High School and now Demaree and others must raise more money.
They’ve connected with the Lakota School District, where in 2024, 15-year old Aspen Runnels was hit and killed in a crosswalk. Ohio Rep. Thomas Hall, R-Madison Twp, is proposing Aspen Runnel’s Law which would increase penalties for motorists who hit a pedestrian in a school zone.
Effective Strategies
A report by the WHO called Pedestrian safety: a road safety manual for decision-makers and practitioners, identified 18 safety measures that can work to keep pedestrians safe. It stresses the importance of “a comprehensive, holistic approach that includes engineering, legislation and enforcement as well as behavioral measures.”
Traffic calming is a key part of the plan.
Speed humps work
The US Department of Transportation says speed humps slow cars down by about 10-percent. Detroit installed 2,000 of them every year between 2018 and 2023 and crashes decreased 14-percent.
And it goes beyond that. Bloomberg reports, “researchers have found that a series of roadway bulges can reliably change driver behavior.”
The Transportation Manager of St. Petersburg, Florida calls speed humps her bread and butter. Milwaukee City Engineer Kevin Muhs says, “Everybody starts a conversation about an unsafe road with, ‘Can we put a speed hump there?’”
Roundabouts are reducing crashes
The Ohio Department of Transportation has analyzed crash data from 76 intersections that have been converted to roundabouts. Single-lane roundabouts decreased injury crashes by 69-percent and multi-lane roundabouts saw a 25-percent decline.
A state news release points to the intersection of State Route 41 and State Route 235 in Clark County as one of the best examples. In the 11 years since the state installed a roundabout there hasn’t been a single fatal crash. Leading up to that, the state tried rumble strips, multiple stop signs, flashing beacons, a traffic light and while overall crashes decreased, serious injury crashes went up.
Vision Zero
The Swedish government introduced a traffic safety program in 1997 called Vision Zero. The goal was for no one to die or be seriously injured. It was so successful in Sweden that it spread across Europe and is now in the U.S. As part of Vision Zero, New York City recorded the fewest traffic fatalities in recorded history during the first six months of 2025 and pedestrian deaths were down 19-percent.
Ohio and Cincinnati are also part of Vision Zero.
Bike safety
Cities are increasingly installing bike lanes but Ohio Bike Lawyer Steve Magas says there is a long way to go. Brick by Brick’s Hernz Laguerre Jr. interviewed him for this podcast. Magas’ stats on bike crash data in Ohio can be found here.
Cincinnati is in the process of updating its Bicycle Transportation Plan. Here’s some information about bike lanes and bike parking.
Dayton’s 2024 Active Transportation Plan has the following goals:
- Education and Outreach
- Health and Safety
- Alignment and Collaboration
- Equity and Access
- Infrastructure and Services
Limitations
A WHO policy brief says there is a lack of political buy-in for road safety, funding is inadequate for the size of the problem, and resources are wasted on ineffective actions like school-based education on road safety and driving training instead of sound evidence-based opportunities.
In addition, raised crosswalks and speed humps are expensive. Cincinnati Senior Planner Mel McVay says because of drainage needs a raised crosswalk costs $200,000. A city engineer has come up with a much cheaper version. Concrete speed humps can cost as much as 80,000 per location (20,000 a lane). McVay hopes to use more speed tables (like a raised crosswalk, but instead of concrete, use blacktop) on major roads to save money.
Looking ahead
Smart Growth America analyzed U.S. Department of Transportation data and found pedestrian fatalities are up 68-percent since 2011. It puts the 7,522 pedestrians who died in 2022 in perspective saying, that number is the population of Buena Vista, Colorado, the student population of Gonzaga University and more than three Boeing 737s falling from the sky every month for a year.
Fortunately, pedestrian deaths in Ohio are down 17-percent from 2023-2024. And cities here are continuing to look at solutions.
For example, Mel McVay is regularly speaking to a national organization about what Cincinnati has done to re-engineer speed humps, making sure they slow traffic and are not too bumpy and expensive.
On the world stage the Road Safety Market is projected to surge to more than $12 billion by 2030. The industry includes projects, services and technologies designed to prevent accidents and improve overall safety on roads.
How do we keep pedestrians safe? Is it more than speed humps and raised crosswalks? Does there need to be a change of mindset for both drivers and pedestrians? We want to build community around context and solutions in our cities. Your feedback is very important to the effort, as we continue to dig deeper into the responses to some of our most pressing social issues, including the housing crisis. Click on the green button below to take a short survey to help reinforce and refine our work. Thank you.
Ann Thompson – Host, Producer
Over the last thirty years in Cincinnati, Ann Thompson has brought a wealth of knowledge and expertise to her reporting. She has reported and anchored for WVXU, WKRC, WCKY, WHIO-TV and Metro Networks and freelanced for NPR, CBS and ABC Radio. Her work has been recognized by the Associated Press and she has won awards from the Association of Women in Communications and the Alliance for Women in Media. She is a former News Director and Operations Manager. Ann has reported from India, Japan, South Korea, Germany and Belgium as part of fellowships. Ann thinks of the Brick by Brick project as “journalism for good.” She serves as host and producer. Ann lives in Anderson Township with her husband Scott. They have two boys. Jake graduated from the Air Force Academy in 2022 and Kurt attends West Point.
