Wide, fast-moving arterial roads are particularly dangerous for pedestrians. Pennsylvania Avenue by Mike Maguire licensed under Creative Commons. It’s an unfortunate fact about DC that in neighborhoods where car ownership is low, the rate of pedestrian crashes is high. You may have seen this chart making the rounds on Twitter a few weeks ago, showing a strong inverse correlation: Who drives cars: Who gets hit by cars: pic.twitter.com/dAdjC10XnO— Charlotte Lee | 미국아줌마 (@cljack) January 21, 2021 You may think (as a lot of people did) that it’s obvious that “more people walking around” leads directly to “more people getting hit by cars.” But even if you set aside the countless cities around the world with lower rates of both car ownership and pedestrian crashes, and look specifically at DC, this doesn’t hold up. The main driver of the disparity between crashes in high and low car ownership neighborhoods isn’t the amount of time people spend walking, but where they’re walking — and where they’re not walking.