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FHWA Home / Safety / Pedestrian & Bicycle / Hispanic Pedestrian & Bicycle Safety

Hispanic Pedestrian & Bicycle Safety

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Executive Summary

In the spring of 2001, the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) issued a Request for Applications (RFA) to select one or more local jurisdictions to demonstrate and evaluate the effectiveness of a comprehensive pedestrian safety countermeasures program. As a result, FHWA awarded three cooperative agreements to the following locations: Las Vegas, Nevada; Miami-Dade County, Florida; and San Francisco, California. The three study teams were charged with demonstrating and evaluating the effectiveness of a combined pedestrian safety engineering and intelligent transportation systems (ITS)-based area-wide countermeasures program for reducing pedestrian fatalities, injuries, conflicts, and other surrogate measures of safety.

Each of the field teams conducted two-phase studies. Phase I involved a detailed analysis of pedestrian crashes, the selection of appropriate countermeasures, the development of implementation and evaluation plans, and collection and analysis of baseline data. Phase II involved the actual implementation and assessment of the impacts of the countermeasures identified in Phase I. The project included self-evaluations conducted by each of the field teams, as well as an independent national evaluation and cross-cutting study conducted by an independent contractor.

As a result of the pedestrian safety analyses conducted in Phase I, each team selected a number of pedestrian safety countermeasures for deployment. Throughout the project, some of the selected countermeasures changed due to issues with vendors, procurement, or approval from location jurisdictions to install the countermeasures. Nevertheless, in the end, a wide range of traditional and ITS-based countermeasures were deployed at a large number of sites in the three locations.

EVALUATION OBJECTIVES

The objectives of the evaluations were to assess the safety and mobility impacts of the pedestrian safety countermeasures selected for deployment. The evaluations involved collecting and analyzing quantitative data related to the safety and mobility impacts of the countermeasures.

The field teams collected and compared baseline and post-deployment data at the sites where countermeasures were deployed. A wide range of data was collected, depending on the countermeasures being deployed. Data collected included those associated with safety surrogate measures of effectiveness (MOEs) (e.g., driver and pedestrian behavioral data), driver mobility MOEs (e.g., travel times and speeds along corridors), and pedestrian mobility MOEs (e.g., pedestrian delays).

This report brings together the findings from the self-evaluations and contains cross-cutting analyses, where possible, of those countermeasures that were deployed by more than one of the field teams. Lessons learned by the field teams throughout the course of the project are also synthesized and presented herein.

RESULTS

This report presents and discusses the evaluation results for 18 pedestrian safety countermeasures (or combination of countermeasures). Ten of the 18 countermeasures were deployed by more than one of the field teams, and the remaining seven countermeasures were deployed by only one of the three field teams. For the purposes of presenting and discussing the results, the countermeasures were grouped into the following six categories:

The findings are fairly mixed and in some cases inconsistent; however, this is not surprising considering the wide range of countermeasures installed, the various pedestrian safety problems at hand, the diverse locations and study sites at which the countermeasures were installed, and the somewhat different approaches to data collection and evaluation used by the three field teams. These were studies conducted in the field with real-world variables that cannot be controlled. Nonetheless, there were many notable and promising findings from the field tests and evaluations. A summary of the findings is as follows:

STATIC SIGNS

ACTIVE SIGNS

PAVEMENT MARKINGS

SIGNALS AND SIGNAL TIMING

PHYSICAL SEPARATION

LIGHTING

LESSONS LEARNED

Implementation and evaluation of the Pedestrian Safety Engineering and ITS-Based Countermeasures Program was challenging. The major steps in the project included:

Each step of the project offered new challenges to the project partners that are presented here as lessons learned. The lessons learned include general lessons learned and countermeasure-specific lessons learned. General lessons learned include the following:

Countermeasure-specific lessons learned include the following:

CONCLUSIONS

Overall, the implementation and evaluation of a comprehensive pedestrian safety program proved to be a very challenging undertaking for each of the three field teams involved. There were many lessons learned over the course of the 6-year project, ranging from assembling and maintaining communications with a diverse set of project partners, to countermeasure selection and procurement, to the details associated with the successful application of particular countermeasures.

The various countermeasures were classified according to effectiveness using overall findings of the field studies: high effectiveness, moderate effectiveness, low effectiveness, and effectiveness depends on application. While based on the field teams' results, the classification was subjective in nature. However, the classification of the countermeasures in this way has been done in an attempt to give the reader an idea as to which countermeasures may have the most promise in impacting pedestrian safety and which others may not.

Five of the countermeasures were classified as being highly effective in impacting behaviors related to pedestrian safety. These five countermeasures cover a range of applications, including signal timing, active and in-street signs, call buttons that provide feedback, and roadway design elements. Each of the countermeasures offers something unique over traditional countermeasures, whether it be providing additional information to pedestrians, high visibility to pedestrians or motorists, or an advantage to pedestrians when crossing. Therefore, it is not surprising that these countermeasures resulted in the most positive impacts. They include:

Four of the countermeasures were classified as being moderately effective in impacting behaviors related to pedestrian safety. These countermeasures were the most difficult to classify in that there were positive findings, yet the findings were either mixed or inconsistent either within or across the field locations. In addition, they are all considered as "active" countermeasures that might have potential to increase safety. They include:

Five of the countermeasures were classified as having low effectiveness in impacting behaviors related to pedestrian safety. Three of these countermeasures were pavement markings and two of the countermeasures were static signs. These five countermeasures are static and it is not surprising that they did not produce more significant results when compared against the active and more innovative devices. The low effectiveness countermeasures include:

The effectiveness of three of the countermeasures seemed to depend mostly on the application, with positive impacts in one application and less positive impacts in another application. These countermeasures include:

 

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Page last modified on February 1, 2013
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