Pedestrian Accident Research in Berkeley and California

As of 2022, pedestrian deaths in the United States from road traffic crashes reached their highest number in 41 years, at 7,522 deaths out of more than 40,000 annual lives lost (See Naumann et al, “Pedestrian and Overall Traffic Crash Deaths,” 2025, CDC). Locally, Berkeley has seen two pedestrian deaths in 2025 in the last few months alone (Berkeleyside.org), and Berkeley PD reporting that a staggering 24% of all traffic-related deaths in California are pedestrians (BerkeleyCA.gov).

This webpage is intended as a general overview of recent scientific and medical approaches to this tragic threat to our roadways. We are a law firm, and are here to help you assess your family’s legal rights each step of the way.

How Do Pedestrian Accidents Occur?

An excellent 2022 article by Tong and Bode in the Journal of Royal Society Interface, “The Principles of Pedestrian Route Choice,” provides a systematic overview for understanding why pedestrians make the choices they do. This article breaks these choices into a useful framework.

Tong and Bode break pedestrian choices into information perception (how we use information selectively and purposively when walking), information integration (how we integrate space and our environment into our decisions), information response (how we are repelled or attracted to certain feedback loops), and decision-making mechanisms (how we trade or weigh information).

Tong and Bode’s article highlights many of the ways that pedestrians behave differently than the traffic they are forced to navigate, such as avoiding obstacles in sidewalks, reacting to unpredictable changes in weather or roadway conditions, or choosing routes according to habit, architecture, or municipal infrastructure. These variables are often unappreciated by drivers sheltered in their cars, and the results are often tragic.

One of the striking points made in this article is the claim that pedestrians perceive, integrate, respond, and decide upon a route depends on context. As such, an essential goal of accident reconstructionists, urban planners, police departments, and client-focused law firms is to establish the relevant spectrum of variables that led a pedestrian injury or fatality to occur in the first place. All too often, defense counsel argues that a pedestrian was ‘jaywalking’ or breaking a traffic rule—without paying attention to the human, habitual, or structural reasons which led to the accident.

What are Some Examples of Context-Heavy Pedestrian Roadways in Berkeley?

Anyone who lives in Berkeley recognizes intersections between UC Berkeley and our surrounding city, especially University Avenue and Telegraph Avenue, where thousands of students, staff members, and residents flood the roadway between classes, or during morning and evening commutes. We also recognize the Marin circle, where the Alameda, the steep and often slick Marin avenue, and other streets intersect at our famous fountain. Still others will recognize the confluence of Martin Luther King and the freeway, where commuter traffic flashes into and out of Berkeley and Oakland, or the many areas where the Ohlone Bike Path crosses our city streets. These are context-heavy intersections because our pedestrians and drivers are encountering each other with multiple purposes, informational inputs, and decisions simultaneously. The result is predictable and tragic—that more pedestrian injuries will occur until structural and behavioral changes are made.

When viewed as a whole, Berkeley’s city streets present a major public health concern, with consequences for all of our residents, families, and communities, and serve as an example for cities all over California. Our dense and diverse population, commercial drivers, and commuter traffic demand that each of us pay heightened attention to safety. This duty extends all the way from city planning and traffic enforcement to our drivers, cyclists and pedestrians. Berkeley’s Vision Zero Action Plan has the city’s concerted effort to respond to these issues (See BerkeleyCA.gov). At The Law Office of Scott Herndon, we analyze these issues seriously and holistically—not just in Berkeley, but everywhere in California where our clients are injured.

Additional Research Papers on Pedestrian Accidents

Disability and Pedestrian Road Traffic Injury (Schwartz, 2022)

Another excellent study was published in 2022 by Schwartz et al, “Disability and Pedestrian Road Traffic Injury: A Scoping Review,” in Health & Place, Here, Schwartz points us to the way disabled pedestrians interact with roadways and drivers, whether by the way our roadways are designed (often, for ‘able-bodied’ pedestrians), by the way drivers interact with them (such as wheelchairs), or by the way physical challenges (such as deafness, blindness, or simply age) impact route choices.

Schwartz argues that social and environmental factors all too often contribute to injury-related inequalities, and that there is a need for research exploring the risk of road injury at the “intersection of disability, poverty, racialization, and other social categories of difference.” At the Law Office of Scott Herndon, we take this mandate seriously.

Children’s Fear in Traffic and Its Association with Pedestrian Decisions (Wang, 2022)

In Wang’s interesting paper from the Journal of Safety Research, Wang and others describe the role of fear in the decision-making of children on our streets. They describe the complex psychology of children, where some children who reported more fear made safer pedestrian choices in high risk situations. But they also note that some fearful children actually made excessively cautious decisions in less risky situations, failing to cross streets when they could have done so safely. This delay sometimes resulted in increased risk from oncoming traffic—as a result of perceptions from caution itself.

Wang’s article results in thought-provoking questions, and requires that we understand the world of the child in the complex traffic situations they face, especially after school, blocks away from crossing-guards and the safety nets provided by our municipalities. This article reports a staggering 34,000 children ages 5-14 died from road traffic crashes globally in 2017 alone.

The Law Office of Scott Herndon: The Clear Choice

At The Law Office of Scott Herndon, we are continually reviewing published scientific and medical research which can deepen our ability to analyze our cases, and represent our client base with world-class academic and legal attention. We consult with experts from the many disciplines which can lend insight in to the causes and effects of roadway choices. This makes us noticeably different in a legal world ever marked by surface reasoning. Give us a call today.