Driver Of Massive Snow-Covered Pickup Hits 67-Year-Old Pedestrian While Making Right Turn

Trucks are too tall. Drivers are bad about clearing snow off their cars. Right turns across crosswalks are inherently dangerous. Last week, those three factors came together in Chicago, and they put a 67-year-old woman in the hospital after a 39-year-old man hit her in a crosswalk according to NBC 5 Chicago. Video from across the street shows a woman waiting at the corner of Belmont Avenue and North Pulaski Avenue with her bags, then stepping into the crosswalk once she's given the walk sign — only for the driver in the lumbering red Ford to, without pause, mow her down. 

That surveillance footage is embedded below, within a local Fox affiliate report that cuts around the actual impact of the woman hitting the ground. The woman's head barely crests the hood of the massive pickup, and that's before accounting for the driver's impaired visibility from all the snow piled up on the hood — it's no wonder he didn't see her while making his right turn across her crosswalk. The only question is why any of the factors that led this woman to be hospitalized — let alone all of them — are still realities pedestrians have to face in 2025.

A few accounts have posted a longer video from another angle to Instagram, which I will link but won't embed. The full clip shows the truck driver hitting the woman, as the Fox clip does, but shows the aftermath as well — the driver initially tries to just keep driving, before someone opens the truck's passenger door and seemingly tells the driver to stop. It seems, from the footage, that the Ford driver truly did not see the woman he hit at any point before he exited his truck. There's no reason for trucks to be so massive and insulated from their surroundings, no reason for cars to be allowed to travel with snowdrifts impeding their visibility, and certainly no reason for drivers to be given the green light the exact moment that pedestrians get their walk sign. 

At some point, we're going to have to reckon with the ever-increasing size of vehicle front ends. These taller and taller hoods translate to more and more deadly impacts, and the snow can only shoulder so much of the blame — were this woman just a little bit shorter, were she not wearing a hat that added to her height, she may have been invisible past the front of the Ford even without snow involved. Trucks like these make American roads dangerous, and we can't keep letting pedestrians be harmed by them.