Introduction With enhancement of road traffic conditions the safety of pedestrians is improved in Chongqing. This paper is to analyse accidents involving pedestrians in Chongqing from 2000 to 2006 so as to understand responsibility distribution, accident causes and injury characteristics.

Methods The data of pedestrian road crashes and injuries in three districts from 2000 to 2006 were collected and input into Road traffic crashes and road traffic injuries database to analyse responsibility distribution, causes, casualties.

Results 9.07% (1702) of total crashes were pedestrian traffic crashes in 7 years. There were 1418 crashes causing injury of pedestrians, accounting for 8.13% of total crashes causing injury and 284 crashes involving death of pedestrians, accounting for 21.66% of total crashes resulting death. The crashes caused by pedestrians led to 2114 injuries, accounting for 4.64% of all injuries and to 438 deaths, accounting for 16.57%. The main causes of these crashes were illegally crossing driveway (74.30%). Of all pedestrian casualties, 57.94% were due to illegally crossing driveway.15.43% of the casualties were on the crosswalk.

Conclusions The crashes caused by pedestrians have higher proportion of death than that of injuries. Illegally crossing driveway is the main cause for these crashes. It is worth noticing that a rather high proportion of pedestrians are impaired on the crosswalks, indicating that we should pay more attentions to protecting right of pedestrians on the crosswalks.