They are walking to work, crossing to a bus stop, or simply trying to get home. And in Georgia, far too many of them are not making it.
From a man struck and killed on Peach Orchard Road in Augusta late on a Tuesday night, to a 23-year-old airlifted from a rural road outside Tennille in the early morning hours, to a pedestrian killed on I-75 after being struck by a DeKalb County Police patrol vehicle, the incidents are piling up. And they are happening all over the state, in cities and small towns alike, on interstates and neighborhood streets.
But there’s more to it, than the official story or the incident report from your local police departments.
According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, Georgia has ranked among the ten most dangerous states in the country for pedestrians for years running. The most recent federal data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration shows that pedestrian fatalities in Georgia have climbed sharply over the past decade. In 2022, the most recent year with complete federal data, Georgia recorded 345 pedestrian fatalities, according to the association. That placed the state among the deadliest in the nation on a per-capita basis. Nationally, pedestrian deaths hit a 40-year high in 2021, with more than 7,300 people killed. Georgia accounted for a disproportionate share.
The Georgia Department of Transportation has tracked the trend with alarm. Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities in Georgia increased by more than 50 percent. In metro Atlanta alone, pedestrian deaths have become a near-daily occurrence.
And so far in 2026, the incidents keep coming.
A State-Wide Problem Playing Out in Real Time
The archive of recent Georgia pedestrian crashes reads like a map of the state’s failure to protect its most vulnerable road users.
In Savannah, a man died after being struck while crossing Eisenhower Drive outside of a crosswalk on February 13. Officers responded around 7:10 p.m. to the intersection of Eisenhower Drive and Waters Avenue. The man was taken to Memorial Health Medical Center, where he died.
In Marietta, 38-year-old David Shackelford was struck by a 2009 Ford Escape on North Fairground Street at Washington Avenue around 6:30 a.m. on a Friday morning. He was walking in the northbound lanes when the vehicle hit him. He was transported to Wellstar Kennestone Hospital with life-threatening injuries. No charges were filed.
In Cobb County, a pedestrian was fighting for their life after a hit-and-run driver in a newer-model Chevrolet Silverado struck them on South Cobb Drive near Waldrep Circle and kept going. The victim was not in a marked crosswalk.
And on I-95 near the Georgia-Florida state line, a pedestrian was struck on the northbound lanes, forcing Florida law enforcement to shut down highway exits and divert traffic to Highway 17 and Highway 40.
When something happens once it is an accident. Twice, it is a coincidence. But 345 times it becomes a problem. The first step to meaningful change is admitting there is a problem. Georgia has a problem with pedestrian deaths. Most law enforcement agencies will admit that, but then they place the blame on the pedestrians — which is also a problem.
What Georgia Law Actually Says — And What It Leaves Out
One of the most persistent myths on Georgia roads is that pedestrians always have the right of way. They do not — at least not under current state law.
The Marietta Police Department addressed the question directly in a public post, laying out the law plainly.
“When crossing a roadway anywhere other than a marked crosswalk — or an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection — pedestrians must yield the right of way to vehicles,” the department wrote. “In other words, pedestrians do not have the right of way at all times.”
The department also tackled another common misconception — that it is acceptable to enter a crosswalk when the red hand signal is displayed.
“That’s the same as running a red light,” Marietta police wrote.
Under Georgia law, specifically, drivers must yield to pedestrians in marked crosswalks and at intersections with pedestrian control signals. But outside of those designated areas, the burden shifts. Pedestrians crossing mid-block or at unmarked locations are legally required to yield to traffic.
Georgia law does require drivers to exercise “due care” to avoid striking pedestrians under all circumstances — but that standard has proven difficult to enforce and even harder to prosecute when crashes occur outside crosswalks.
Clayton County police put it bluntly in a recent Facebook post, saying the county has had “way too many pedestrian vs. vehicle crashes,” and some have been fatal.
“Here’s the plain truth: pedestrians do not automatically have the right of way,” the department wrote. “Unless you’re in a marked crosswalk and the walk signal is on, vehicles have the right of way and pedestrians are required to yield.”
That framing — legally accurate as far as it goes — reflects a deeply embedded assumption in Georgia’s approach to road safety: that the pedestrian’s behavior is the central variable. But safety researchers, urban planners, and transportation advocates increasingly argue that framing gets the problem exactly backwards. And the states with the best pedestrian safety records have built their entire approach around a different premise entirely.
The Blame Problem: When the Law Becomes a Shield for Bad Infrastructure
Here is what Georgia’s legal framework does not account for: in many parts of this state, pedestrians have no realistic choice but to cross mid-block or walk along roadways without sidewalks. The infrastructure simply does not exist to do otherwise.
When a person is struck crossing Eisenhower Drive in Savannah, or walking along a rural road outside Tennille, or trying to reach a bus stop on a six-lane arterial in Clayton County — the question of whether they were in a marked crosswalk misses the larger point entirely. In many of those locations, there is no marked crosswalk within a reasonable distance. There may be no sidewalk at all. The road was designed for cars, and the pedestrian was an afterthought — or no thought at all.
Transportation researchers have a term for this: the infrastructure deficit. And Georgia has one of the worst in the nation.
According to Smart Growth America, Georgia consistently ranks among the most “dangerous by design” states in the country — a designation that reflects not just driver behavior, but the physical design of roads themselves. Wide lanes, high speed limits, minimal lighting, absent or inadequate crosswalks, and long distances between safe crossing points all contribute to pedestrian deaths in ways that no amount of public education can fix.
When law enforcement agencies post reminders telling pedestrians to use crosswalks, they are giving advice that is often physically impossible to follow. And when the legal framework places the burden of yielding on pedestrians outside of crosswalks, it effectively absolves drivers — and the governments that designed the roads — of responsibility for what happens next.
That is not a safety strategy. It is a liability strategy. Police departments are actually covering for infrastructure problems.
Here’s how they get away with it. In Georgia, as in many southern states, the prevaling philosophy among the population is one of individual responsibility. There are no community problems. When a pedestrian is hit, residents will either blame the pedestrian or the driver. Somebody was responsible and somebody wasn’t. Most residents will never question the infrastructure. Also, Georgia residents are law and order-oriented. If it is the law, you follow it. You don’t question it or consider changing it.
These two prevailing philosophies make it easy for government — which law enforcement is a representative of — to gloss over important infrastructure issues by over-simplifying who is at fault.
Law Enforcement’s Response: Education Over Enforcement
Across Georgia, the law enforcement response to the pedestrian crisis has been largely educational. Departments are posting reminders on social media, issuing public safety alerts, and urging both drivers and pedestrians to be more careful. What has been largely absent is a coordinated enforcement strategy — and any serious reckoning with the role road design plays in these deaths.
Gwinnett County Police issued a reminder this week as warmer weather draws more people outdoors, asking drivers to stay alert, use caution when backing up, allow pedestrians to fully cross before moving forward, and drive with patience and courtesy. The department did not announce any new enforcement action or traffic safety measures alongside the reminder.
Clayton County police were similarly candid about their approach, saying the effort was “not to scare anyone or write tickets, but to help keep people safe.” The department framed its outreach as being “about awareness” and “about education.”
Marietta police echoed that tone, writing: “By working together and staying aware, we can help ensure everyone gets to their destination safely.”
The messaging is consistent and well-intentioned. But awareness campaigns alone are not moving the needle and the fatality numbers support that argument. Georgia has been running pedestrian safety awareness campaigns for years. The death toll has gone up, not down.
There is also a troubling asymmetry in how these campaigns are framed. The public posts from Georgia law enforcement agencies spend considerable space explaining when pedestrians do not have the right of way. They spend considerably less space on the legal obligations of drivers — the speeding, the distracted driving, the failure to yield even in marked crosswalks — that research consistently identifies as the primary cause of pedestrian fatalities.
That asymmetry shapes public perception of who is responsible when someone is killed. And in Georgia, it has helped sustain a culture in which the pedestrian is too often treated as the problem.
Car Culture vs. Pedestrian Culture: A Tale of Two Approaches
To understand why Georgia keeps failing its pedestrians, it helps to understand how the state got here, and how other states chose a different path.
Georgia’s road network was largely built during the postwar suburban expansion of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, when the car was king and the pedestrian was an afterthought. Wide arterial roads, sprawling commercial strips, and subdivisions with no sidewalks were not accidents of planning. They were the plan. The entire built environment was organized around the assumption that everyone would drive everywhere, all the time.
That assumption shaped not just the roads, but the laws, the culture, and the reflexes of law enforcement. When someone is struck walking along a road with no sidewalk, the instinct — legal and cultural — is to ask what the pedestrian was doing there. The road was not built for them. Implicitly, they were not supposed to be there.
How Other States Are Doing It Differentlyr
Oregon adopted its first statewide pedestrian safety plan decades ago and has continuously updated it. The state’s approach is explicitly driver-responsibility centered. Oregon law requires drivers to stop and remain stopped for pedestrians at all crosswalks — marked or unmarked — and the state has invested heavily in enforcement of that requirement. Oregon also mandates pedestrian safety considerations in all road design and reconstruction projects, meaning that when a road is rebuilt, it must be made safer for people on foot. The state’s pedestrian fatality rate is consistently among the lowest in the nation.
Washington State goes further still. Washington law places the burden of care squarely on drivers, requiring them to yield to pedestrians not just in crosswalks but whenever a pedestrian is present on or near the roadway. The state has also adopted a complete streets policy that requires all new road projects to accommodate pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users, not just cars. Washington’s Vision Zero framework treats every pedestrian death as a system failure, not a behavioral failure by the individual who was killed.
New York City is perhaps the most dramatic example of what happens when a jurisdiction decides to treat pedestrian deaths as a policy problem rather than a personal responsibility problem. After adopting its Vision Zero Action Plan in 2014, the city reduced speed limits on most streets from 30 mph to 25 mph, installed thousands of speed cameras in school zones, redesigned dangerous intersections, and expanded pedestrian plazas. The city’s pedestrian fatality rate dropped significantly in the years following implementation. The approach was not built on telling pedestrians to be more careful. It was built on redesigning the environment so that driver error was less likely to be fatal.
Massachusetts law goes further than Georgia’s in protecting pedestrians at crosswalks, requiring drivers to yield to any pedestrian who has stepped off the curb to cross — not just those already in the roadway. The state also has stronger penalties for drivers who fail to yield, and its registry of motor vehicles tracks crosswalk violation enforcement as a distinct category. Massachusetts consistently ranks among the safer states for pedestrians on a per-capita basis.
Minnesota has taken an infrastructure-first approach, prioritizing the installation of pedestrian refuge islands, raised crosswalks, and high-visibility lighting at dangerous intersections. The state’s Department of Transportation uses a data-driven model to identify the highest-risk locations and target capital investment there first. The underlying philosophy is that you cannot educate your way out of a design problem.
California, despite its own car-centric history, has made significant strides through a combination of legislative action and local policy. In 2023, California enacted a law decriminalizing jaywalking — a move that explicitly acknowledged that pedestrian behavior laws have been disproportionately enforced against Black and Latino residents. The law, known as the Freedom to Walk Act, does not eliminate the expectation of safe crossing behavior, but it removes the criminal penalty for crossing outside a crosswalk when it is safe to do so. The underlying message is significant: the state stopped treating the act of walking as a crime.
Georgia has taken none of these steps in any meaningful, coordinated way.
What Would It Actually Take to Fix This?
The answer, according to transportation safety researchers and urban planners, is not a single policy change. It is a fundamental reorientation of how Georgia thinks about roads — who they are for, who is responsible for keeping them safe, and what the state is willing to spend to get there.
That reorientation would require several things happening at once.
It would require legislative action to strengthen driver responsibility laws — raising penalties for failure to yield in crosswalks, expanding the legal definition of where drivers must yield, and creating meaningful consequences for distracted driving that results in pedestrian injury or death.
It would require infrastructure investment on a scale Georgia has not yet committed to — sidewalk construction along high-risk arterial corridors, improved crosswalk lighting, reduced speed limits on roads where pedestrian activity is high, and installing pedestrian refuge islands at dangerous mid-block crossing points.
It would require a data-driven enforcement strategy that goes beyond social media posts — one that identifies the intersections and corridors where pedestrian crashes are concentrated and deploys traffic enforcement resources accordingly.
And it would require a cultural shift in how Georgia law enforcement, Georgia courts, and Georgia residents talk about pedestrian crashes. As long as the default framing is that the pedestrian should have been more careful, the pressure to fix the roads — and hold dangerous drivers accountable — will remain limited.
None of this is cheap. None of it is fast. And in a state that has historically prioritized highway capacity over pedestrian safety, none of it is politically easy.
But the alternative is already playing out, one crash at a time, on roads from Augusta to Savannah, from Marietta to the Georgia-Florida line.
The People Behind the Numbers
It is easy, in a story full of statistics and policy arguments, to lose sight of what is actually happening on Georgia’s roads.
A man does not make it home from where he was going on Peach Orchard Road in Augusta. A 23-year-old is loaded onto a helicopter from a rural road outside Tennille and airlifted to a trauma center. David Shackelford, 38 years old, is struck before sunrise on a Friday morning in Marietta and taken away in an ambulance with life-threatening injuries. A driver in a Chevrolet Silverado hits someone on South Cobb Drive and does not stop, doesn’t even slow down.
These are not statistics. They are people with lives, families, children, and careers. And in Georgia in 2026, the state has still not decided that keeping them alive is worth the cost of doing things differently.
The awareness campaigns will continue. The Facebook posts will keep going up. And unless something changes in the law, in the infrastructure, in the culture, so will the funerals.
