Photo by rosiedawn

The authors (and dare we say, the readers) of this web site often get pretty exercised over pedestrian and cyclist safety issues, especially when so many of these kinds of accidents seem to involve city bus drivers. But a new study of relative pedestrian safety finds that D.C. is actually one of the safer cities in the country to be traveling through without an automobile. According to Transportation for America, a transportation advocacy group, walking in Washington is less dangerous than in 31 other metro areas in the U.S.

The rankings (you can read the whole report here) make some basic sense: at the top half of the list are cities like Orlando, Houston, Atlanta, Las Vegas and Phoenix – cities that were built to a car scale, where hardly anyone walks. East Coast cities that were designed before the automobile, like D.C., Philadelphia, New York and Boston, are all in the bottom half of the list. D.C. did come in at #32, however, making it ranked as somewhat less safe than most other eastern U.S. cities. The only other East Coast city that ranked worse than D.C. was Baltimore, coming at #29.