The district is "confounded" by the increase in pedestrian deaths in 2005. 16 deaths as opposed to the average of 12. Personally I think one is dealing with too small a sample size to determine that something is "wrong" - though even 12 deaths seem high. Several possible causes for the accidents are given. Some blame a failure to enforce the laws against cell phone users, jaywalkers, red-light runners and the sort. Some point to a need for better education efforts - namely through the Street Smart initiative. And still others mention better traffic engineering. The things that surprised me most from all of this reporting is that they didn't break out pedestrian accidents from cyclists and that they seemed to not keep any metrics. Who was involved in the accidents (bike/pedestrian, bike/car, two cars that collided and one hit a pedestrian etc...)? Who was deemed at fault in the accidents? What were the contributing factors (speeding, cell phone, failure to signal etc...)? It seems that with proper recording this wouldn't be so confounding.
There was a great article in Wired about sign-less intersections that leads me to think these problems are mostly the result of engineering flaws. If you have to spend millions of dollars to teach adults how to cross the street - maybe there's something wrong with your intersection. Sure, no amount of design is going to protect you from a drunk driver, and it seems that every time I've had a close call on my bike, the driver was on a cell phone - but I think better design can go a long way. Even if that better design is for your bike.
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