Halloween is terrifying. Not just because of the scary movies it inspires and the creepy costumes you’ll see out there today. But also because of the spike in deaths.
As Streetsblog USA pointed out on Twitter, Halloween is by far the worst day of the year for child pedestrian fatalities due to car crashes:
A friendly reminder that if you speed your car through a neighborhood on Halloween, you are a bad person. pic.twitter.com/ghmzUjv5p5
— Streetsblog USA (@StreetsblogUSA) October 31, 2017
Obviously, the major factor for these deaths is there are simply a lot more children wandering around on the streets during Halloween. As Joel Best, a researcher at the University of Delaware, told me, “We send millions of kids out to the dark. They get hit by cars, they trip on their costumes, they can’t see out of their masks — all kinds of injuries occur.”
So parents, make sure your kids are careful out there. And drivers, be careful out there too — don’t speed, and be on the lookout for kids charging out of houses with bags of candy.
