The fatal crash underscores the danger of poor sidewalk conditions and sidewalk parking.

We are saddened to learn that a man was struck and killed while walking on Bennett Street late Thursday night, June 25, near Oakwood Street at the edge of East Hills. Our hearts go out to his family and community as they deal with this tragedy. At this time, very little details are known about the crash, which is currently under investigation, and the victim has not yet been identified.

Here is what officials have shared so far. Around 11:30 p.m., Pittsburgh Public Safety said first responders were called to Bennett and Oakwood streets for a pedestrian crash, where they found a man lying in the roadway who appeared to have been struck by the driver of an SUV traveling westbound on Bennett. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

According to the SUV driver, after the collision he got out of his vehicle to check on the man when a second driver of a gray Toyota Prius also struck him and did not stop. The Collision Investigation Unit is processing evidence, including camera footage from the area. On Sunday morning, Public Safety told reporters that the Prius had been located, though no arrests have been made.

We have limited details at this time, and we are waiting on more from Public Safety and the City’s Fatal Crash Response Team, so we won’t speculate about exactly what happened in those moments. But there is a question worth considering…

Why was he walking in the road?

So far, the reporting has been told almost entirely from the drivers’ point of view: one driver stayed, one didn’t, and the man was “walking in the roadway.” That framing makes it seem like the victim is at fault without considering whether he even had a choice of whether or not to walk in the street to get where he was going.

Of course the victim sadly can’t tell his side of the story, but we can look at the conditions on the ground. In WTAE’s video from the scene, it appears that cars were parked on the sidewalk right where the crash happened, and a review of Google Street View shows there isn’t really a legitimate sidewalk at that location at all. What’s there is an extension of an asphalt parking lot, and part of it is blocked off by makeshift barricades instead of offering a safe place to walk.

So the real question isn’t why the victim was in the street, but why isn’t there a safe place to walk?

It may be that he had nowhere else to go. When the sidewalk is parked over, fenced off, crumbling, or simply doesn’t exist, walking in the street becomes the only option. A sidewalk that’s broken or blocked by parking is functionally equivalent to no sidewalk at all, which pushes people walking into the same space as people driving.

This is not a rare problem, and it is not a small one. Nationally, nearly two-thirds of pedestrian deaths in 2023, the most recent year of complete data, happened in places without a sidewalk (GHSA). When we don’t give people a safe place to walk, we shouldn’t be surprised when they end up walking somewhere dangerous.

We don’t know the full story of this crash yet, but we do know that the walking conditions on this stretch of Bennett Street are very poor, and that matters.

A known-dangerous corridor

Bennett Street is a state-owned roadway, and it sits on the City’s High Injury Network, the small share of streets where the most serious crashes are concentrated. Just 10% of Pittsburgh’s road network accounts for 76% of fatal crashes and roughly 79% of all pedestrian crashes. State-owned roads like Bennett make the pattern starker still: PennDOT owns only about 12% of the roads inside city limits, but those roads account for nearly half of Pittsburgh’s fatal crashes. This corridor is well known to be dangerous for people walking and biking, so a death here is a tragedy, but it is not a surprise.

It’s also worth naming where this happened. East Hills and Homewood are neighborhoods that have faced decades of disinvestment, and across the county, underserved communities see well over half of all crashes involving people walking and biking while making up only about a quarter of the road miles (Allegheny County Safety Action Plan). Who gets a safe place to walk, and who doesn’t, is not random.

Between 2015 and 2024, Pittsburgh lost 202 people to traffic violence, 59 of whom were walking. These deaths are preventable, and that is exactly why the City’s commitment to Vision Zero matters. Vision Zero starts from the idea that traffic deaths are not inevitable, and that we can design our streets so that human mistakes don’t turn deadly. We will never get to zero traffic fatalities while people are forced to walk in the path of moving cars because there’s no safe, accessible sidewalk to use.

What now

The investigation is ongoing, and the second driver has still not been identified. If you have any information about the crash, please call Pittsburgh Police at 412-432-4776.

We’ll share more as the City’s Fatal Crash Response Team completes its work.