U.S. Department of Transportation
Federal Highway Administration
1200 New Jersey Avenue, SE
Washington, DC 20590
202-366-4000
U.S. Department of Transportation
Federal Highway Administration
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In this issue:
USDOT Summit on Pedestrian Safety: Virtual Series
Bicycle Facility Design Web-Based Training
Update on FHWA Bikeway Selection Guide
Free Assistance Still Available for Scalable Risk Assessment Methodology
Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety Strategic Plan Update
Enhancing Mobility, Access and Safety for Pedestrians Webinar Series
STEP UP for Pedestrian Crossing Safety–We Want You!
Free Webinar Recordings Available
Safety Study on Pedestrian Crossing Warning MUTCD W11-2 sign with Embedded LEDs
As mentioned in the Winter 2019 edition of this newsletter, Federal Highway Administrator Nicole Nason and National Highway Traffic Safety Deputy Administrator James Owens have both made pedestrian safety a priority for their respective agencies. As part of this, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) have planned a series of virtual webinars on pedestrian safety in July. The goal of these webinars is to provide a virtual dialogue platform and opportunity to discuss pedestrian safety issues and determine initiatives and actions to improve pedestrian safety.
The Summit will include the following three webinars:
Webinar 1 – Opening Session (Introduction and Taking Action on Pedestrian Safety:
Safe Systems Approach) July 8, 2020 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM (EDT).
Webinar 2 – Taking Action on Pedestrian Safety (Consider Risk: When, Where, Who and How) July 15, 2020 1:00 PM – 2:30 PM (EDT)
Webinar 3 – Closing Session (Taking Action on Pedestrian Safety: Next Steps) Tuesday, July 28, 2020 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM (EDT)
Individual registration is necessary for each of the three sessions. Attendees should register by July 2, 2020 by visiting www.pedestriansafetysummit.com
Contributed by Becky Crowe
The new Bicycle Facility Design web-based training course is complete, and is available for free for anyone seeking to learn more about planning and designing bicycling facilities. This National Highway Institute (NHI) course helps practitioners deliver high-quality, safe, multimodal projects efficiently and effectively by delivering critical planning and design information.
It covers principles of bicyclist safety, comfort, and connectivity, selection of bikeway type and associated design considerations at an intermediate level, and national planning and design resources. The course length is estimated at 8 hours over 10 modules (that can be completed at your own pace), and is appropriate for planners, engineers, and others interested in the planning and design of bicycling facilities.
Direct link: https://www.nhi.fhwa.dot.gov/course-search?tab=0&key=bicycle&sf=0&course_no=142080
If you have questions about this NHI training, please contact NHI at nhicustomerservice@dot.gov or 877-558-6873.
If anyone has any additional questions, please contact Darren Buck,
Darren.buck@dot.gov, or 202-366-1362.
FHWA released its Bikeway Selection Guide a year ago, a resource to help transportation practitioners consider trade-offs and make decisions to accelerate the delivery of high-quality bicycle networks. FHWA will continue to offer free technical assistance and workshops on the guide for about the next year. Throughout 2020, FHWA will offer this workshop virtually.
Local, regional and state agencies can request a virtual workshop by contacting Tamara.Redmon@dot.gov. Participants will review online training materials before joining an interactive 3-hour online event to learn more about how to apply the Bikeway Selection Guide to plans and projects.
As mentioned in the Summer 2019 Edition of this newsletter, FHWA discovered that states and localities are already starting to use the Guide. Here are some new ones since that last newsletter article:
Please let tamara.redmon@dot.gov know if you are aware of any other examples.
As mentioned in the Fall 2018 edition of this newsletter, the FHWA published the Guide for Scalable Risk Assessment Meth-ods for Pedestrians and Bicyclists (and accompanying Areawide Exposure Tool) which outlines eight sequential steps to develop risk values, and describes the scope and nature of each step, including guiding principles.
Practitioners can use these scalable risk assessment methods to evaluate pedestrian and bicyclist risk at different geographic scales to inform program and project funding decisions. FREE technical assistance is still available through the Fall! Virtual session are also a possibility. We just completed a well received 3 hour training with the state of Arizona with over 90 attendees.
For more information on the guide, training or technical assistance, contact Shawn Turner (the project's Principal Investigator with TTI) or Tamara Redmon.
The FHWA Safety Office recently awarded a contract to the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute to develop a Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety Strategic Plan. The objective is to update the 2010 Pedestrian Safety Strategic Plan to provide FHWA's Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program direction for the next five years. The plan will augment the initial program and plan to include the bicycle mode and integrate the latest state of practice on multimodal safety into a "big picture" guiding vision with the ultimate objective of reducing pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities in the U.S., while also increasing accessibility.
The updated Strategic Plan will be (1) data driven, taking advantage of existing national resources and databases on multimodal safety trends, (2) anchored in the state of the practice of vast national knowledge on multimodal safety, design, and policy research, and (3) focus on directly implementable countermeasures and strategies.
The Strategic Plan will explicitly address the knowledge, research, and deployment gaps identified through a review of literature and through stakeholder engagement, relying heavily on data to prioritize future research and deployment activities. The projects, programs, deployment activities, and research efforts identified in the Strategic Plan will reflect the vision, mission, and goals of FHWA and will be reasonable to accomplish in the five-year time frame of FHWA's Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program.
FHWA held a very well attended webinar series (2,109 attendees) on Enhancing Mobility, Access and Safety For Pedestrians on April 28 (Part 1) and April 30 (Part 2).
The Webinars were recorded and are available for viewing here:
The FHWA Safe Transportation for Every Pedestrian (STEP) Program has supported States and cities across the U.S. with technical assistance and guidance to make pedestrian crossing locations safer since the program started in 2017. The STEP Program aims to reduce pedestrian fatalities at uncontrolled crossing locations. STEP promotes five countermeasures for improving pedestrian safety at midblock and unsignalized crossings, including crosswalk visibility enhancements, raised crosswalks, pedestrian refuge islands, Pedestrian Hybrid Beacons (PHBs), and Road Diets.
This summer, FHWA will highlight improvements that help reduce pedestrian fatalities in dark conditions, between intersections, and involving vulnerable older pedestrians as part of a campaign called STEP UP. FHWA will share social media posts, educational videos, and case study examples that illustrate how the STEP countermeasures can help. STEP UP will begin in June 2020 and continue through Fall 2020
WE WANT YOU to get involved in our Campaign!!! If you're a local or state agency, please share a photo of where you have implemented the STEP countermeasures. Please send your success stories and project photos to Becky Crowe (STEP program manager) at Rebecca.crowe@dot.gov.
The STEP program will highlight these local and state examples through social media and Every Day Counts news outlets. Follow FHWA on social media to learn how other agencies STEP UP to improve pedestrian safety at crossings. If you would like more information on the STEP program, contact Becky Crowe with FHWA's Office of Safety or Peter Eun with the FHWA Resource Center.
FHWA and the PBIC have developed and recorded a number of webinars over the years that are perfect for those that are still social distancing and working from home due to Covid-19. The PBIC archives of the webinars are available and often still relevant and useful.
Some of the more current webinars are:
Tamara Redmon, Pedestrian Safety Program
Manager
Federal Highway Administration
1200 New Jersey Avenue SE
Room E71-303
Washington, DC 20590
Phone: 202-366-4077
Fax: 202-366-3222
E-mail: tamara.redmon@dot.gov
This Pedestrian and Bike Forum is available on the Web at http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/ped_bike/pedforum/
To receive information on future newsletters, please use the esubscription service provided on this site: http://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/esubscribe.cfm. Scroll down to "Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety" and select "subscribe" next to "Pedestrian Forum."
Helping Communities to provide safe and convenient transportation choices to all citizens, whether it's by walking, bicycling, transit, or driving is a high priority of the U.S. Department of Transportation. Each year, unfortunately, pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities comprise about 17 percent of all traffic fatalities and there are approximately 6,000 pedestrian and bicyclist deaths. Another 115,000 pedestrians and bicyclists are injured in roadway crashes annually. Pedestrian and bicyclist safety improvements depend on an integrated approach that involves the four E's: Engineering, Enforcement, Education, and Emergency Services. The Pedestrian and Bicyclist Forum highlights recent pedestrian and bike safety activities related to the four E's that will help save lives.
The FHWA Office of Safety Research and Development awarded a contract to Texas Transportation Institute in January for a Safety Study on Pedestrian Crossing Warning MUTCD W11-2 sign with Embedded Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs).
LEDs can be embedded in standard highway warning and regulatory signs to outline either the sign itself or the words and symbols on the sign. The LEDs may be set to flash or operate in steady mode. LEDs may be illuminated 24 hours a day, or be activated by vehicles or pedestrians.
The objective of this task order is to evaluate the overall safety performance and develop a crash modification factor for the MUTCD W11-2 Pedestrian Crossing Warning sign with Embedded LEDs that can be applied at uncontrolled pedestrian crossing locations (mid-block and unsignalized intersections).
Due to the limited availability of this newer signage, standard crash data may not be adequate or available for a comprehensive safety study. Surrogate safety measures of effectiveness, like drivers yielding to staged pedestrians, will be collected instead for this project.
To date, 71 installations have been identified that meet the project's criteria (the signs are a Pedestrian (W11-2), School (S1-1), or Trail Crossing Warning (W11-15) sign with pedestrian activated embedded LEDs). The research team recently provided the findings from the site selection and the determination of data availability task which included the estimated sample size for a crash analysis.
The 2-year study will be complete in January 2022.
For more information contact Ann Do.
Source: FHWA
