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FHWA Home / Safety / Pedestrian & Bicycle / Miami-Dade Pedestrian Safety Project: Phase II

Miami-Dade Pedestrian Safety Project: Phase II

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CHAPTER 6 PHASE II CONCLUSIONS

6.1 LESSONS LEARNED

6.1.1 Lessons Learned: Overall Project Success

The project was successful in demonstrating the ability of a local government/ university team to develop a data based plan to improve pedestrian safety, focusing on higher-injury areas, and then to implement and evaluate this plan.  The positive aspect of the program was the focus on low cost innovative engineering improvements to address pedestrian crashes in each corridor. It also provided an opportunity for the Miami-Dade team to take a cooperative approach with FHWA and the other two teams to identify best practices in pedestrian safety.

Because Miami-Dade had the previous experience with the NHTSA project that emphasized education and engineering countermeasures, the Miami-Dade team was well positioned to continue these extensive measures and to build on them to implement a complete multifaceted triple E program with heavy emphasis on Engineering, Education and Enforcement.

The focus on low cost engineering provides a model of what is possible in the absence of a large corridor wide engineering project.  The Florida Department of Transportation often implements corridor wide safety projects that involve large scale improvements.  These projects typically produce large benefits for all road users.  In this project rather meager resources were utilized to produce large changes in 8 corridors that lead to significant crash reductions.

The federal funding was extremely helpful and appreciated as was the enhancements provided by FDOT and Miami-Dade County that assisted us in demonstrating the effectiveness of targeted low cost improvements.

6.1.2 Crash Reductions

The most important lesson learned was that inexpensive pedestrian safety engineering measures could produce a very significant reduction in crashes when introduced on top of an existing public education and enforcement program focusing on pedestrian safety. The installation of the engineering countermeasures on top of the NHTSA education and enforcement efforts lead to a reduction of 51 crashes per year for all sites.  This represents a 50% reduction over the baseline condition and a 41% reduction from the NHTSA project levels.  Because we selected high crash corridors and the crash reduction was so large, the overall reduction in our 8 corridors represented a 6.5% reduction in all crashes on State and County roads in Miami-Dade County.

6.1.3 Lessons Learned from Experimentation

A number of lessons were learned from the experimentation conducted as part of this study and the results have been published in four papers in Transportation Research Record. Additional papers will be submitted for publication this year.

Highlights of Research Results

6.1.4 Lessons Learned: Implementation

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Page last modified on February 1, 2013
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