When a city tries to improve pedestrian safety, most of the time they’ll take what’s called (informally) the “hot spot” approach. With limited funds, this method improves one particular area – a mid-block crosswalk or an intersection, for example – where a person walking had previously been hit by a vehicle.
The problem with this approach, however, is that fixing areas where a pedestrian crash occurred doesn’t account for risk factors present in other areas. If pedestrian crashes rarely happen in a city, improving the one spot where the crash happened doesn’t protect people walking in a high-risk area.
A better approach is a systemic approach, according to the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP)’s new analysis. A systemic approach – looking at pedestrian infrastructure as a network – “enables transportation agencies to identify, prioritize, and select appropriate countermeasures for locations with a high risk of pedestrian-related crashes, even when crash occurrence data is sparse,” according to the report.
The key ingredient of the NCHRP’s guidelines for the systemic approach is determining common risk factors throughout the road system. Determining these risk factors comes from data collection, but importantly, not just crash data. the NCHRP recommends collecting a variety of data types: number of lanes on a road, vehicle traffic, pedestrian volumes, transit ridership, and population and employment density.
Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab