Streetlights Aren't Saving Arizona's Pedestrians
Flagship Study ยท Arizona
53%
of Arizona's walking deaths since 2020 happened on a street with working lights
Federal fatal-crash records show 647 of Arizona's 1,217 pedestrian deaths with a known light condition happened after dark on a lit street, a 53% share that dwarfs the 39% share nationwide.
Federal fatal-crash records, Arizona · 2020-2024
Turn on a streetlight and most people expect the road to get safer. Arizona's record says otherwise. Drivers killed 1,217 people walking on Arizona roads. The window ran 2020 through 2024, and each crash has a known light condition. Of those 1,217, 647 died after dark on a street with working lights. That's 53% of the people, better than one in two. Nationwide, the same share is 39%. Arizona's lit-street toll runs well past the national norm.
This isn't a story about broken lights or dark backroads. It's the opposite. The streets in this count were lit and drivers still could not, or did not, see the person in front of them in time. That points away from the easy fix. Adding more streetlights will not solve a problem that mostly happens where the lights are already on.
What the record does point to is speed and street design. Wide, high-speed arterial roads carry more travel lanes, longer crossing distances, and fewer forced stops. A lit road on one of those streets still asks a driver to spot someone on foot with almost no time to react. Slower, narrower streets built for the people crossing them would matter more here than another light pole.
A lit-street death toll that more than doubled
Arizona pedestrian deaths on lit streets after dark, by five-year span
In the early 2000s, Arizona saw about 58 of these deaths a year. By 2020 through 2024, the five-year count reached 647. That's up 122% from the 291 counted in 2000 through 2004. The climb did not happen gradually. It jumped hardest after 2015. Those were the same years Arizona kept adding people and wide desert arterial roads.
Maricopa County carries an even bigger share
Zoom into Maricopa County and the pattern gets sharper. From 2020 through 2024, the county recorded 801 pedestrian deaths. Of those, 498 people died after dark on a lit street. That's 62%, nearly 2 in 3. It's well above Arizona's own 53% and far past the 39% national share. Phoenix and its suburbs carry the state's biggest share of both people and wide, lit arterial roads. The county's toll reflects that mix.
Put the three numbers side by side. Nationwide, 39% of pedestrian deaths with a known light condition happen on lit streets after dark. In Arizona, it's 53%. In Maricopa County, it's 62%. Each step in, the lit-street share climbs. The place with the most people and the most wide roads has the worst gap between having light and staying safe.
What the record can and can't say
This record can't say why any single driver missed a person on foot. It can say the pattern is large, it's grown for two decades, and it concentrates on Arizona's busiest streets, not its darkest ones. That's a different problem than a burned-out light bulb, and it needs a different fix. Slower streets, shorter crossings, and road design built around the people walking them would answer a pattern that "add more lights" cannot.
Arizona's broader pedestrian-accident picture continues here. So does how the state compares to the rest of the country, in our state-by-state rankings.
Citation
injured.org, “Streetlights Aren't Saving Arizona's Pedestrians,” analysis of federal fatal-crash records, Arizona, 2000-2024. https://injured.org/data/the-lit-street-paradox/
Methodology
We pulled this from federal fatal-crash records, 2000-2024. Read the full methodology →
Updated July 2026
Full source detail lives on our data sources page, including how the light-condition and county fields are defined.