Evaluation of Surrogate Measures for Pedestrian Safety in Various Road and Roadside Environments

Most analyses of pedestrian traffic safety measure safety in terms of police-reported traffic accidents. For pedestrian safety, it may be more useful to observe surrogate measures of safety, such as a "severe conflict" between a pedestrian and a motor vehicle in order to offer a broader picture of the safety at a particular road location than just considering police-reported accidents. This could help planners and designers learn how to select road and roadside elements to make pedestrians feel safer and thus increase the effectiveness of strategies or development patterns aimed at increasing the livability of communities. The objective of this project is thus to investigate the relationship between roadway and roadside design elements and traffic incidents involving pedestrians. Specifically, the researchers will select a set of intersections known to have substantial pedestrian volumes and with targeted roadway and roadside characteristics, such as the pedestrian crossing distance, presence or absence of on-street parking, type of traffic control, 85th percentile traffic speed, and the surrounding land use type and density. At these intersections, the team will count the flow of pedestrians and motor vehicles and the conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles over a period of several hours using the Swedish Traffic Conflict Technique. Appropriate and accurate statistical models will then be fitted in order to predict conflict counts as a function of these road and roadside features. The researchers will also gather from a crash database reported pedestrian accident counts at the locations over several years, and estimate statistical models relating the occurrence of incidents with the crash counts, to learn more about the relevance of the incident count as a surrogate for accidents in safety analysis.

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Active
• Funding: $88909.00
• Contract Numbers:

  DTRT06-G-0025

  CTLS 11-04

• Sponsor Organizations:

  Center for Transportation and Livable Systems

  University of Connecticut, Storrs
  Storrs, CT  United States  06269-2037
• Project Managers:

  Lownes, Nicholas

• Performing Organizations:

  Center for Transportation and Livable Systems

  University of Connecticut, Storrs
  Storrs, CT  United States  06269-2037
• Principal Investigators:

  Ravishanker, Nalini

  Ivan, John

• Start Date: 20110822
• Expected Completion Date: 0
• Actual Completion Date: 0
• Source Data: RiP Project 29876

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Pedestrian counts; Pedestrian movement; Pedestrian safety; Pedestrian vehicle crashes
• Uncontrolled Terms: Statistical models; Surrogate safety measures
• Subject Areas: Design; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01481461
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Center for Transportation and Urban Planning
• Contract Numbers: DTRT06-G-0025, CTLS 11-04
• Files: UTC, RIP
• Created Date: May 17 2013 1:00AM