How this is made
This is an independent record of people killed walking or riding on Southern California's streets since 2020. It is not a government site. Its aim is that each person is counted and, wherever possible, remembered by name.
Who is counted
People killed by a motor vehicle while walking or riding, from January 1, 2020, in ten counties: San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, Kern, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange, Riverside, San Diego and Imperial.
- Walking includes using a wheelchair or another mobility device.
- Riding means a bicycle, e-bike, motorized bicycle, electric scooter or electric skateboard. Crash reports list scooter and e-skateboard riders as drivers of their own vehicle; they are counted here as riders when another vehicle struck them.
- The death happened on a public road or in a parking lot. It is counted even if the driver struck the person on purpose.
- Not counted: deaths with no motor vehicle involved, such as a fall from a bike, a crash between two riders, or a train. Mopeds are not counted either, because they are motor vehicles.
- Each death is counted once, even when more than one police agency filed a report.
Where the information comes from
- Crash reports. Every death starts from the California Highway Patrol's California Crash Reporting System (opens in a new tab), which gathers crash reports from police agencies across the state. It is checked each month. It gives the date, time and place, the vehicle involved, and whether the driver left the scene. It never gives names.
- Who they were. Each month, news coverage, coroner and police releases, obituaries and memorial pages are searched, starting with the most recent deaths. Names, ages, stories and case updates come from these. Every detail is stored with the exact words of its source and a link to it, checked against that source, and reviewed by a person before it appears here.
- With thanks. BikinginLA (opens in a new tab) has tracked bike deaths across Southern California for years, and many riders' stories here come from its reporting.
Where each person is on the map
About 40% of crash reports have no map coordinates. For those, the dot is placed at the intersection the report names, using OpenStreetMap; if that can't be found, at a street address; and if neither can be found, at the center of the city. The same is done when a report's coordinates are clearly wrong, and for deaths known only from the news, using the streets the article names. When a news story places a death more exactly than its report does, the story's place is used. Each person's page says how their location was found. The circle in the corner of the map lists people with no known location yet. Several people at exactly the same point, such as three killed in one crash, are shown as one numbered marker; click it for their names. The map opens on where the people are, not on the whole region.
Checked against 300 reports that do have coordinates, half of these placements were within 40 meters of the reported spot and 85% within 250 meters. About 1 in 20 was at the wrong intersection.
Rates by county
The county table compares counties by deaths per 100,000 residents per year, using U.S. Census Bureau population estimates. Totals alone mostly follow population; the rate shows where the risk is highest. Only complete years are used, because recent years are still being reported and would make the rate look lower. Walking and riding rates are also shown separately, each per 100,000 residents. Rates in italics rest on few deaths, so they can change a lot from year to year.
The bikeways column shows kilometers of painted bike lane, protected bike lane and off-street path for every 100 kilometers of street, shown as a percentage, from OpenStreetMap. It is a rough comparison, not a survey: bike lanes are mapped more completely in cities than in rural areas. Compare it with the riding rate, not the walking one. It shows where bikeways exist; it does not show that they prevent deaths.
The chart under Trends sets each county's bikeways against its riding death rate. With only ten counties it cannot show cause, and counties with fewer than 30 riding deaths are drawn hollow because their rates can swing. Its headline says "no clear pattern" when the correlation between the two is weak.
Connecting news stories to crash reports
Crash reports carry no names, so a news story is linked to its report by date, county, city, age, gender and place. The link is made automatically only when one report clearly fits better than any other; close calls are checked by a person. A death known only from the news is marked "No official report yet" until its report appears.
Why recent numbers are low
Police agencies can take many months to send their reports to the state, and about 1 in 20 arrives more than a year and a half after the crash. So counts for recent months keep rising as reports come in. They are shown as "at least", and the monthly chart shows those months lighter. A lower count this year does not mean the streets have become safer.
Deaths of people riding also tend to reach the news sooner than deaths of people walking, so recent months can show a larger share of riders than the final count will.
What the count can miss
The count is a minimum, not a complete total. A death appears here only if it reached the state's crash records or the news. Some are missed: a crash on private property, a death weeks after a crash that the report does not record, or a report that does not list the person as walking or riding.
Case updates, such as "no arrest yet", show the date a source last reported them and may have changed since. About 500 details on 58 of the earliest records were entered by hand, with a link to their source, before the exact quote was stored for every detail.
Why fault findings are not shown
Each crash report also records which person the investigating officer found most at fault, and whether a person walking was in a crosswalk. These findings are not published, here or in the downloads. They are usually made without the account of the person who was killed, and a note such as "crossing outside a crosswalk" does not say whether there was a crosswalk nearby to use.
What is published, and what is not
- A person reviews every name, story and memorial link before it is published.
- Drivers are never named. Only what happened is reported: whether they stayed, and whether they were arrested, charged, convicted or sentenced.
- A child is named only after their family or officials have made the name public.
- Photos are never copied here. Memorial and fundraising pages are linked instead.
- These are crashes, not "accidents", and each person is described as a person first.
Corrections and removals
If you knew someone here and something is wrong, or you would like details added or removed, please write to orenbj@gmail.com. Anyone who knew them can ask, and you will get a reply within a week. Removed details are taken off the site and out of the downloads. The death itself stays in the count, without a name.