If you’ve ever taken a walk down an arterial road in the suburbs of Atlanta (a journey I don’t especially recommend), you’ll probably notice something puzzling and a bit disconcerting. There are scarcely any pedestrian crosswalks. You may have to walk a mile down the busy highway to find a place where you can cross the street legally and safely. Most pedestrians don’t bother to do this. They cross in the middle of the road, braving the dangers inherent in dodging the speeding cars. There are also very few medians to make the ordeal of crossing an arterial a little safer.
This problem is on obvious display in Cobb County, the suburban behemoth of three-quarters of a million people just northwest of the city. In 2024, there were 14 pedestrian fatalities, a figure that exceeds the average of 12 for the pre-pandemic years. In Cobb County, the best available information is that while just 0.2 percent of all car crashes involve fatalities, the number jumps to 10 percent when the victim is a pedestrian. The primary suspect is the roads. “These aren’t accidents,” one Cobb engineer has said. “They are a result of road design.” And the most lethal flaw in the design of the county’s broad arterial highways is the absence of safe places to cross the street: Over 11 years, 58 percent of fatally injured pedestrians were crossing outside a crosswalk.
Cobb County, to its credit, has been devoting a chunk of its resources to finding how and why these crashes occur. It has uncovered some compelling and distressing facts, in cooperation with the Georgia Department of Transportation and as detailed by the Marietta Daily Journal and the newspaper’s excellent transportation reporter, Hunter Riggall…