If anything, the numbers suggest that pedestrians need to practice vigilance no matter where they walk.

Those are the broad conclusions drawn from a Honolulu Advertiser analysis of more than 1,000 auto-pedestrian collisions reported to police in a two-year period.

"There's really no pattern to pedestrian accidents. They can happen almost anywhere," said Gordon Hong, head of the state Transportation Department's Safe Communities Program.

"You don't feel safe anywhere," added Hilda Inouye, whose husband, Hiroshi, 83, was struck and killed by a car while walking on Diamond Head Road near Fort Ruger Park last year. "The road was really wide there and traffic was light, but he still got hit."

• Waikiki, particularly along Kalakaua and Kuhio avenues.

• Downtown Honolulu, on King, Beretania and Bishop streets.

• Kalihi, Palama and Liliha, including School Street and Nu'uanu Avenue.

• 'Aiea and Waipahu, along Farrington Highway and Moanalua Road.

• Farrington Highway through the Leeward Coast.

"If there's a common string in all those, I'd say it's long thoroughfares moving through old commercial areas," said Scott Ishikawa, Department of Transportation spokesman.

Business areas are places where drivers, pedestrians and buses all converge, creating a dangerous mix of people and vehicles on the move, Hong added.

By contrast, O'ahu's suburban residential communities — areas where residents have sometimes demanded more traffic-calming measures to slow speeding drivers — seem to have relatively few pedestrian accidents.

Kailua, Hawai'i Kai, Mililani, Kapolei, Wahiawa and other suburban areas developed with wider sidewalks since the late 1950s do not have as many accidents, except along their commercial streets.

The Advertiser analysis is based on 1,055 traffic accidents reported to police involving pedestrians from August 2002 to August 2004 in which an injury was claimed or the vehicle suffered more than $3,000 in damage.

Pedestrians cross Hotel Street in Downtown Honolulu without the aid of a crosswalk, ducking between city buses. Downtown has one of the highest numbers of pedestrian injuries. An Advertiser analysis of pedestrian accidents suggests many occur along main bus routes. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

The police information often does not include precise locations or other details of how the accident occurred, but it does provide useful insight on where pedestrians and drivers alike need to exercise extra caution, officials said.

"If you want to make sense of the problem, you need information like this to get started," said Ed Hirata, head of the city's Transportation Services Department, which recently began analyzing state accident data to identify problem areas and address them. "We're going do a lot more of that type of analysis in the future."

Traffic safety experts say pedestrian patterns are notoriously hard to identify, in part because they don't cluster near particular intersections. Instead, they are often spread out across long stretches of highways or arterial roads with few stoplights, sidewalks or other pedestrian safeguards.

"Pedestrians tend to make snap decisions. Unlike drivers in cars, they can run out into the road or intersection at any time or place," Ishikawa said.

Farrington Highway, Moanalua Road, King Street, and Kalakaua, Kuhio and Kapahulu avenues all appear to be areas where that happens frequently on O'ahu, safety officials say.

Many of the accidents also appear to fall along main bus routes.

"A lot of accidents occur when people, especially elderly people, are rushing to cross the street as a bus approaches," said Jane Greenwood, an Emergency Medical Services ambulance supervisor.

The results of The Advertiser's geographic analysis parallel state Health Department statistics, which show the neighborhoods with the highest number of pedestrian injuries include Kalihi-Palama, Waikiki, Downtown, Ala Moana and Wai'anae.

The results also mirror a national study released late last year.

"The most dangerous places to walk are metropolitan areas marked by newer, low-density developments, where wide, high-speed arterial streets offer few sidewalks or crosswalks," according to "Mean Streets 2004," a report sponsored by the national Surface Transportation Policy Project.

The report criticized states for not spending more money on pedestrian safety; it indicated that Hawai'i was about average nationally when it comes to money spent on such projects, using about 1 percent of all federal transportation funds on bicycle- and pedestrian-safety efforts.

While police reports in Honolulu do not attribute fault to any party involved in an accident, they do list contributing causes. The leading factors are inattention and misjudgment.

"It works both ways," said 86-year-old retired postal worker Phillip Kam, who both walks and drives around his Young Street home. "There are a lot of stupid pedestrians out there, but the drivers are really aggressive."

Hilda Inouye agreed.

"I'm afraid to walk around there anymore, but what can you do? Everybody just needs to be more careful," she said. "The drivers have to pay more attention, but I see a lot of pedestrians, too, who don't even look when they cross the street, whether they're in a crosswalk or not."

The geographic analysis of pedestrian accidents has broad implications for safety officials. Because the injuries occur all over the island, police and others cannot easily target specific areas for education or enforcement.

"If we had a magic pill, we would have used it a long time ago," Hong said. "The challenge is to make people feel safe wherever they walk."