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On an August morning two years ago, Meredith Melville was crossing Piedmont Avenue in Oakland, California, to meet a friend at a cafe. While in the crosswalk, she noticed a car some distance away.
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Perhaps she misjudged its speed, she said, because she’d walked only partway across the street when the car, a Toyota sedan, came bearing down on her.
“She should have seen me,” Melville said of the driver. “All of a sudden she was there, and I didn’t have any way to get out of her way. I flew I don’t know how many feet.”
Passersby came to help; the police and an ambulance arrived. Soon Melville, a retired teacher, was at a hospital being treated for multiple fractures. Surgeons replaced her right hip and repaired her broken right elbow. She would probably need a knee replacement soon, too, doctors advised.
After a week’s hospitalization and a month in rehabilitation, Melville, then 73, went home in a wheelchair. Physical therapists helped her gradually progress to a walker and then a cane, but “it was a long process,” she said.
She still contends with back and knee pain and hasn’t been able to resume the hiking and backpacking she loved.
Still, when people say she’s lucky, Melville agrees. “It could have been a lot worse,” she said.
Older pedestrians, like Melville, aren’t injured by motor vehicles at a greater rate than younger ones, according to 2023 data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But they’re more likely to die. The death rate for pedestrians over 65 is higher than the average for all ages. Nearly 8,200 pedestrians 65 or older were injured that year — likely an undercount because not all serious crashes and injuries show up in police reports. More than 1,500 died. And the picture is not improving.
Researchers point out that older pedestrians remain more vulnerable to collisions. “They move through intersections at a slower pace,” said Andrew Rundle, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. Impaired hearing or vision can make them less apt to notice approaching vehicles or respond to traffic signals. And because reaction time slows with age, they’re less able to evade a car that’s turning, speeding, or ignoring a signal.
Physically, they “have greater frailty, loss of muscle mass and fragile bones,” Rundle said.
As a result, “the consequences of injuries are stratospherically different the older you get,” said Charles DiMaggio, an injury epidemiologist at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine. “A hip fracture in a 45-year-old is unfortunate. In a 75-year-old, it’s tragic.”
Moreover, after a marked decline in pedestrian deaths among all age groups from 1975 to the mid-2000s, progress for the older population has stalled for nearly 20 years.
