Rethinking Pedestrian Safety in Latin America

Valeria Carrion Moreno

IRF Young Professional Programme Leader | Transport, Urban Mobility and Road Safety Specialist, Peru 

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I am a transport, urban mobility and road safety specialist from Peru, working across transport policy, traffic management, transport impact assessment, tactical urbanism and safer street design. Through my role in MOVISS, a civil society organisation promoting sustainable mobility and road safety, I have seen how pedestrian safety depends not only on preventing crashes, but on whether streets allow people to move with autonomy, dignity and protection from the first step of their journey.

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Introduction

In many Latin American cities, the most revealing part of the transport system is not the highway interchange, the new bus corridor or the metro station. It is the crossing. That is where policy becomes real, where speed, design, enforcement and accessibility either protect pedestrians or leave them to negotiate their own safety. It is where an older adult may run out of signal time, where a driver may or may not yield, and where a wheelchair user may be forced onto the roadway because the sidewalk disappears.

Safer streets are shaped not only by rules, but by enforcement, design and everyday expectations. I felt this clearly last year while visiting Tacna in Peru and Arica in Chile, two neighbouring border cities where the pedestrian experience felt different. In one, crossing required caution and negotiation. In the other, drivers stopped almost as soon as a pedestrian entered the crossing. It was not formal evidence, but it was a powerful reminder that the same act, crossing the street, can feel entirely different depending on how a city chooses to protect people.

The Gap Is Not Knowledge. It Is Implementation.

Latin America does not lack road safety language. Across the region, transport plans increasingly refer to sustainable mobility, vulnerable road users, Vision Zero, school zones, accessibility, traffic calming and the Safe System approach. The problem is not that the sector has failed to learn the vocabulary. The problem is that the vocabulary has not consistently changed the street.

This is especially visible in pedestrian safety. The World Health Organization estimates that 1.19 million people die on the world’s roads every year, with more than half of fatalities occurring among pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, where nine in ten road deaths occur (World Health Organization, 2023a). In the Americas, the Pan American Health Organization reports that deaths among motorcyclists, pedestrians and cyclists rose from 39 percent to 47 percent of total road fatalities between 2009 and 2021. Pedestrians alone represented 17 percent of road deaths in the region in 2021 (Pan American Health Organization, 2025).

An earlier regional benchmarking study reached a similar conclusion.  In a ten-country study of Latin America, the International Transport Forum found that pedestrians were the largest or second largest group of road deaths in seven countries, and recommended giving priority to pedestrian facilities, speed management and safer access to public transport (International Transport Forum, 2017).

Pedestrian deaths and injuries are still too often treated as the result of exposure, informality or individual risk taking. But exposure does not explain everything. Research from Lima, one of Latin America’s largest urban areas, illustrates how these risks are produced at street level. It has shown that the walking environment is associated with pedestrian and motor vehicle collisions, and that the presence of a bus stop was associated with a threefold increase in the risk of a pedestrian collision (Quistberg et al., 2015a; Quistberg et al., 2015b).

These findings matter because they show that risk is not only carried by the person walking. It is also produced by where cities place crossings, sidewalks, stops, lanes and waiting spaces. 

People cross where their purposes and destinations require them to cross, not only where the city has made crossing safe. They walk where the sidewalk exists, or where it disappears. They wait where the bus stops, not necessarily where the crossing is safe. They adapt to roads designed to move vehicles faster than bodies can safely tolerate. 

That is why the pedestrian safety challenge in Latin America is not mainly a technical knowledge gap. It is a delivery gap. We know the principles. We know the countermeasures. We know the consequences of inaction. What remains unresolved is whether cities are willing to make pedestrian safety measurable, funded, enforceable and politically non-negotiable.

What Cities Choose to Build and What They Still Need to Prove

The implementation gap is also visible in what cities choose to build, measure and enforce. Regional reviews show that Latin America is not starting from zero. Countries and cities have developed road safety agencies, observatories, infrastructure assessment tools, school zone interventions, speed management measures and safer street pilots. But they also show a persistent problem. Progress is fragmented, and instruments do not always translate into safer crossings, slower streets, continuous sidewalks or protected access to public transport (Pinto et al., 2023; International Transport Forum, 2017) .

At different levels of government, Peru, Mexico and Chile have adopted or promoted lower urban speed limits, safer school environments, traffic calming guidance and enforcement tools (Cámara de Diputados del H. Congreso de la Unión, 2023; Comisión Nacional de Seguridad de Tránsito & Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo de Chile, 2025; Ministerio de Transportes y Comunicaciones del Perú, 2024a, 2024b).

At the city level, initiatives such as Bogotá’s long-term pedestrian policy, Mexico City’s Pasos Seguros and Fotocívicas, Quito’s school zone markings and raised crossings, and Fortaleza’s low-speed areas show that the region has begun to move from policy language toward physical intervention (Global Designing Cities Initiative, 2019; Institute for Transportation and Development Policy México, 2022; Municipio del Distrito Metropolitano de Quito, 2023; Secretaría de Movilidad de la Ciudad de México, 2021; Bogotá Mayor’s Office, 2023).

These examples should be recognised, but not romanticised. They show that Latin America already has tools, policies and local experiments in motion. They also reveal the next challenge. The region now needs to prove whether these interventions are changing the street in ways that matter for pedestrians, including lower operating speeds, safer crossings, continuous and accessible sidewalks, protected school environments and fewer serious injuries and deaths.

This is especially important for speed management. International evidence shows that lower urban speeds can produce significant road safety benefits, particularly where people and vehicles mix (World Health Organization, 2023b; Yannis & Michelaraki, 2025). But lower limits do not become real only because they are written into law. Recent research using large-scale street and speed data found that the mere introduction of lower speed limits is not sufficient to reduce driving speeds effectively when street design does not support compliance (Orsi et al., 2025). 

The gap between the rule and the street is where pedestrian safety is won or lost. 

The Lima evidence mentioned earlier illustrates one part of a wider regional problem. Across Latin America, national reforms may align with international recommendations, while local investment does not always show whether streets are being redesigned around people. In some cities, projects focused on vehicle flow and road capacity still receive greater political visibility than pedestrian safety, accessibility and safer access to public transport. When this happens, reforms remain incomplete. 

The Questions Worth Asking Now 

Pedestrian safety should not depend on isolated pilots, temporary urbanism or the political visibility of a single school zone. Pilots matter, but they are not enough. A raised crossing should not be exceptional near a school. A refuge island should not be considered a design luxury on a wide avenue. Safe access to bus stops should not depend on a special project. Universal accessibility should not be added after the road is built. These should be standards, budget lines and audit requirements.

A people-centred safety agenda should start from the opposite premise. Streets should not require assistance as a condition for mobility. Crossings, signals, tactile paving, ramps, refuge islands and walking times should be designed so that autonomy is protected by the environment, not delegated to whoever happens to be nearby.

The next step is to move from counting deaths to reading risk. Crash data will always matter, but waiting for deaths to accumulate before intervening is incompatible with a preventive approach. Conflict analysis, speed studies, pedestrian counts, accessibility audits, near-miss observation, school zone risk mapping and public transport access assessments should be part of ordinary road safety management.

Are school zones physically designed for 30 km/h, or merely signed as such? Are public transport projects required to include safe pedestrian access audits? Are crossings designed for children, older adults, wheelchair users and caregivers? Are governments willing to redesign streets even when it means reducing vehicle speed or vehicle space?

These are not rhetorical questions. They determine whether Latin America’s next decade of transport policy will protect people from the first step of their journey.

The timing matters. We are entering the home stretch of the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021–2030, while the United Nations Decade of Sustainable Transport 2026–2035 is just beginning (World Health Organization, 2021; United Nations, 2023). Latin America does not need another decade of plans that sound safe on paper but fail at the crossing. It needs streets where safety is visible, measurable and built into the first step of every trip.

The question is no longer whether the region knows what to do. The question is whether we are willing to build it now.

Because crossing the street should not be an act of courage.

References

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