Homeless people pay a disproportionate price on the West’s deadly streets

The Pacific Coast Highway winds between the Pacific Ocean and the Santa Monica Mountains in Malibu, California, and on either side of this 21-mile stretch are multimillion-dollar restaurants, shops, and homes. Although the six-lane road is technically a highway, it also serves as the Southern California city’s main street. Pedestrians often cross the highway or walk along the shoulder and dart across the street in places without crosswalks or sidewalks.

Heavy traffic and lack of pedestrian infrastructure have made the Pacific Coast Highway deadly for the beach community. Since 2010, 61 people have been killed, many of them pedestrians, and many more have been injured on this stretch of highway – particularly on a 2-mile stretch aptly known as the “Dead Man’s Curve.” Last year, four Pepperdine University students who were walking on the shoulder were killed by a speeding driver. The tragedy helped draw attention to the dangerous road, but the fatalities didn’t stop there: In October of this year, a woman walking on the side of the road was killed in a collision between a motorcycle and a car.

The woman who died that day was unhoused and was part of an overrepresented population among those killed on that highway. At least eight and probably more of the more than 60 people who died were homeless at the time. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s most recent count found that there were 69 homeless people in Malibu, which has a population of more than 10,000 and more than 10 million visitors per year.

Some of the country’s most car-dependent cities are in the western United States, while parts of the region also have the highest rates of homelessness. And vulnerable people are more exposed to traffic hazards because they spend more time outdoors and walking than the general public—a little-discussed side effect of the West’s car-centric infrastructure.

“We still don’t have a real sense of the scale of the problem, but my feeling is that it’s probably a serious problem. “Over the last decade or so, there has been a pretty significant increase in pedestrian deaths and serious injuries,” said Julia Griswold, director of the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center.

Griswold said this increase coincided with rising homeless numbers and an “alarmingly high number” of pedestrian fatalities on highways, which could be due to people living near and along highways.

In Los Angeles County, where Malibu is located, homeless people are 18.3 times more likely to die from transportation-related injuries than the county’s overall population, with deaths occurring nearly every other day in 2021 and 2022. And the problem isn’t limited to California: In Multnomah County, Oregon, homeless people were 44.8 times more likely to die from a transportation-related injury in 2022 than the county’s overall population.

In Los Angeles County, where Malibu is located, homeless people are 18.3 times more likely to die from transportation-related injuries than the county’s overall population, with deaths occurring nearly every other day in 2021 and 2022.

“It could have been me,” said a 32-year-old from Malibu who goes by the nickname Medusa, reflecting on a recent incident as he crossed a road near Pacific Coast Highway, which connects the library with a public park connects. There is a crosswalk on the street, but no stop sign, just a pedestrian yield sign. The car came within a few meters of Medusa, who is currently unaccommodated, and then screeched to a halt. “They were so shocked that they didn’t hit me. “They had their mouths open,” Medusa said.

Many homeless people in Southern California have similar stories.

“It seems to me that Californians have no respect for homeless people and pedestrians,” said Angela Noaker, 60, as she waited for a bus in Malibu on a recent Sunday. Noaker, who is unhoused, says she was hit by a car while walking through a crosswalk in Riverside, California, earlier this year.

“Almost by definition, someone who is homeless is likely to be on the streets and sidewalks much more often than someone who has a home,” said Michael Schneider, CEO of Streets for All, an advocacy group that focuses on bicycles and pedestrians Security in Los Angeles.

And yet, Schneider said, it hasn’t been a “big focus” in discussions about Southern California’s active transportation movement, which is committed to making streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians. “I haven’t heard from any politicians, and very few people have brought up the fact that one in 10 fatal accidents involves a homeless person.”

When Captain Jennifer Seetoo started as a captain at the Malibu/Lost Hills Sheriff Station in 2022, she noted that nine pedestrians were killed on the Pacific Coast Highway in 2021.

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, nine deaths in one year? Why don’t the bells ring? Why aren’t people jumping up and down, that’s really bad, right?'” Seetoo said. “I realized that six of the deaths were due to my homeless population, and it just struck me that no one cared.” And that was just in 2021; The Sheriff’s Department has not analyzed deaths from other years to determine how many of the deaths involve the unhoused population.

Jimmy Gallardo, an outreach worker at The People Concern, a nonprofit that works with homeless people in Malibu, estimates that in his two years on the job, four to six of his clients have been killed or seriously injured by cars.

Many accidents in Malibu involved speeding; The speed limit on most of the Pacific Coast Highway in the area is 45 miles per hour, but motorists often drive much faster, reaching 60, 70 or 80 – even 100 miles per hour.

“People are just speeding by, and when I’m driving, I pay attention to all of that and I see that they’re just going too fast,” said Gallardo, who spoke while driving a blue People Concern minivan north on the highway. “And then I see where they’re going and they’re going to a little boutique, so you’re doing all this just to brutally park your car and put people’s safety at risk just because you want to go there to shop.”

“I thought, ‘Wait a minute, nine deaths in one year? Why don’t the bells ring? Why aren’t people jumping up and down, that’s really bad, isn’t it?’”

The city of Malibu declared a local emergency in November 2023 following the deaths of the four Pepperdine students, even though the state, not the city, regulates the Pacific Coast Highway. Seetoo is hoping for a newly passed law that would require the installation of speed cameras in high-risk areas along the highway. The California Highway Patrol has increased traffic enforcement and the state Department of Transportation is investing in lane dividers, crosswalk markings and more speed limit and curve warning signs. The Sheriff’s Department and The People Concern have also distributed high-visibility equipment to unhoused locals.

Several people experiencing homelessness in Malibu said they would like to see more changes, including more stop signs and traffic lights, lower speed limits, more crosswalks near bus stops and pedestrian bridges that would allow people to cross the street and at the same time avoiding traffic underneath.

In San Jose, California, officials analyzed the most dangerous intersections after finding that traffic-related deaths among the unhoused population more than tripled between 2018 and 2021. The city is now adding a mid-block pedestrian crossing that connects two halves of a warehouse divided by a dangerous street, even though pedestrian traffic in the area is not high enough to reach the typical threshold for such an intersection.

The Federal Highway Administration considers such changes to the built environment to be the second most effective strategy for protecting uninhabited community members from traffic accidents. However, the most effective option is to improve access to housing, thereby reducing the number of unsheltered people along the streets. In Los Angeles County, two-thirds of traffic-related deaths among homeless people occurred between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m., suggesting that “providing overnight shelters and permanent housing … would help prevent these deaths,” a county department report said of public health.

Gallardo said addressing the problem will also require more systematic changes in how accommodated drivers view unaccommodated pedestrians.

“When people are dehumanized, violence or disregard for their right to life can occur. And when you drive your supercar, you are in your own rich world and you don’t see this person as an individual. You only perceive it as an impairment of your vision. “You don’t realize the value of that person who allows you to drive the way you drive,” he said.

Medusa agreed.

“You have to recognize that there is a human being walking,” she said. “I’m a vessel too.”

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