Background Rural residents’ fatal injuries stand for near to one third of total mortality. While they are expected to suffer such burden of injury at rural areas, but about 85% of those are involved in crashes at urban areas or intercity roads. Moreover the average mortality rate across a time trend shows annually 6 more death per 100 thousands of rural residents compared to urban population. This study attempts to analyze factors that contribute to such increase in the exposure to the risk of rural residents.

Methods This is a cross-sectional study using death registry data from 2012 to 2016. Also other sources of information on rural socio-economic variables were used to determine the correlation of each factor on fatal injury involvement. Then tests of association between selected variables performed.

Results The findings revealed that female pedestrians around intercity roadways are less exposed to fatal crashes compared to those crossing on urban roadways. But walking around minor/rural roads leads to higher exposure to death. While crossing urban and intercity roadways increases the vulnerability of female pedestrians who are respectively 65+and 16–24 years to traffic crashes, walking through minor/rural roads increases the vulnerability of those who are under 15 years. Vulnerability of female pedestrians to crashes showed no significant differences for different day time but wearing dark clothing (mostly veils as common robe in the country) significantly increases their vulnerability.

Conclusions As proved that female pedestrians are more vulnerable at some specified road areas and due to several factors, the above findings assist the officials to deploy pedestrian crash preventive measures at identified hazardous traffic areas and to plan more relevant awareness campaigns and education for females especially at more prone locations.