Modeling Pedestrian and Bicyclist Crash Exposure with Location-Based Service Data

Biking and walking flows are essential components in safety analysis. Most local governments rely heavily on crash statistics to identify locations prone to pedestrian and bicyclist crashes. However, to effectively diagnose pedestrian and bicycle safety, planners and engineers need to know the relative exposure of the pedestrians and bicyclists to risk. Not having appropriate information about the activity patterns and volume of pedestrians and bicycles at locations, it is challenging to accurately identify and predict risk levels at those locations. A variety of pedestrian and bicycle exposure measures have been suggested and tested in the literature (Alattar, Cottrill, and Beecroft, 2021; Goodspeed et al, 2021; Ryus et al, 2017; 3 Turner et al, 2017), but these measures are inconsistent and limited, and there is no widely accepted single approach. Area-based exposure measures are usually estimated at a macro level. This approach does not adequately capture activities at facility-specific geographic scales (i.e., street segments), since data are aggregated to areawide geographic scales. Another group of measures is based on field observation and extrapolation methods. Actual counts observed at selected locations in short periods of time are extrapolated to generate annual average daily pedestrian and bicyclist traffic estimates. This approach will not adequately display the difference in travel time (e.g., morning, afternoon, or evening), seasonal effects, days of the week, and will not cover the entire street network in a region. One of the main challenges in developing exposure measures is the lack of walking and biking activity data available at a finer spatial resolution, such as street segments, covering the entire road network of a city. The main source of information about area-based exposure measures is survey data (such as ACS or NHTS). The units used in area-based exposure measures vary widely and the geographic scale of available travel data is limiting (only 59 records for Lincoln MSA in the 2017 NHTS). This type of data does not have facility-specific trip information. Some local entities are directly collecting pedestrian and bicyclist count data, but these counts are collected at a very limited number of locations. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop a reliable methodology to analyze pedestrian and bicyclist exposure to risk with emerging data sources

Language

• English

Project

• Status: Completed
• Funding: $184,629.00
• Sponsor Organizations:

  Nebraska Department of Transportation

  1500 Nebraska 2
  Lincoln, NE  United States  68502
• Project Managers:

  Halsey, Lieska

• Principal Investigators:

  Nam, Yunwoo

  Butler, Don

  Hawkins, Jason

• Start Date: 20220701
• Expected Completion Date: 20240531
• Actual Completion Date: 0

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bicycle crashes; Bicycle travel; Nonmotorized transportation; Walking
• Identifier Terms: Nebraska Department of Transportation
• Subject Areas: Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Research; I80: Accident Studies;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01849002
• Record Type: Research project
• Source Agency: Nebraska Department of Transportation
• Files: RIP, STATEDOT
• Created Date: Jun 21 2022 12:15PM