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Resident warns of pedestrian safety crisis, says city crash chart obscures serious-injury trend
Summary
Kathy Griswold told the council that fatal and serious-injury pedestrian crashes have been at a 10-year high and criticized a city chart that shows total crashes declining because it combines property-damage-only incidents with serious-injury counts.
Kathy Griswold used the May 4 reserved public comment period to warn the City Council that Ann Arbor is facing a pedestrian safety crisis and that city crash charts risk obscuring the problem.
"For the last 3 years, our fatal and serious injury crashes are have been at a 10 year high," Griswold said. She argued that a downward trend in "total crashes" presented by city staff is driven by a drop in property-damage-only reports—collisions that often go unreported to police because insurance deductibles make reporting unlikely—and not by fewer serious injuries.
Griswold urged the council to stop relying on generalized crash charts that mix property-damage-only counts with serious-injury statistics, calling that approach "an insult to the victims and their families" and saying it "creates a false sense of security that stalls the urgent engineering and policy changes we need." She said the city should prioritize engineering and policy changes targeted at vulnerable road users and more clearly present disaggregated crash data.
Her remarks included numbers framed as trends (fatal and serious-injury crashes at a 10-year high over 2023–25) and an explanation of how reporting practices can reduce property-damage-only counts; the council did not announce immediate action during the meeting.
