Pedestrian Safety

Motor vehicle speed as a risk factor in pedestrian safety

McMillan, Tracy
Cooper, Jill F.
2019

Speed is a significant risk factor in road safety. Several recent reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and the Governors Highway Safety Administration (GHSA) highlight the need for a greater focus on speed management at the national, state and local level. As part of our Community Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Program (CPBSP), UC Berkeley SafeTREC has prepared a new research brief, "Motor vehicle speed as a risk factor in pedestrian safety"...

California Traffic Safety Survey 2022

Ewald, Katrin
Wasserman, Lisa
2022

Ewald & Wasserman Research (E&W) conducted the 2022 California Traffic Safety Public Opinion Study on behalf of the California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) and the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center of UC Berkeley (SafeTREC). Similar to previous years and since 2020, the data collection transitioned from an intercept survey to an online panel with survey panelists provided by Marketing Services Group, a commercial sample and panel vendor.

Panelists consisted of California drivers who were forwarded to an online survey portal programmed and managed by E&W...

Crosswalk Confusion: More Evidence Why Pedestrian and Driver Knowledge of the Vehicle Code Should Not Be Assumed

Mitman, Meghan F.
Ragland, David R.
2014

Traffic safety researchers have long argued that driver behavior outweighs physical elements (such as road design) as a causal factor in motor vehicle collisions. A fundamental causal component of pedestrian—vehicle collisions is also behavior: that of the driver and that of the pedestrian. One determinant of this behavior may be whether the driver, the pedestrian, or both understand the motor vehicle code, which demarcates the right-of-way in pedestrian-vehicle interactions. That is, inappropriate or unlawful behavior may occur because the law is not understood or is misunderstood....

Pedestrian Safety Improvement Program

Grembek, Offer
Bosman, Craig
Bigham, John M.
Fine, Sara
Griswold, Julia B.
Medury, Aditya
Sanders, Rebecca L.
Schneider, Robert J.
Yavari, Afsaneh
Zhang, Yuanyuan
Ragland, David R.
2014

The Pedestrian Safety Improvement Program is an effort of the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to identify and address systemic problems with regard to pedestrian safety in California, with the long-term goal of substantially reducing pedestrian fatalities and injuries in California. The efforts and findings presented in this report reflect the work of a team of experts in transportation engineering, transportation planning, public health, geographic information systems, and urban design from the UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research & Education Center.

Relative Burden of Distracted Driving Fatalities by Characteristic

Griswold, Julia B.
Grembek, Offer
2014

We were glad to see discussion of the dangers of distracted driving to vulnerable road users in the article by Stimpson et al. in the November/December 2013 issue of Public Health Reports. However, we question the conclusion that pedestrian and bicyclist victims of distracted driving crashes are disproportionately nonHispanic white. This inference appears to be drawn from the results in Table 1 of the article, where the rates are calculated per one million total population, which fails to account for the different sizes of the populations of each race/ethnicity. To correctly evaluate the...

Crashes on and Near College Campuses: A Comparative Analysis of Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety

Loukaitou-Sideris, Anastasia
Medury, Aditya
Fink, Camille
Grembek, Offer
Shafizadeh, Kevan
Wong, Norman
Orrick, Phyllis
2014

Problem, research strategy, and findings: College campuses are multimodal settings with very high levels of walking and biking in conjunction with high levels of vehicular traffic, which increases risks for bicyclists and pedestrians. In this study, we examine crash data (both police reported and self-reported) and urban form data from three U.S. campuses to understand the spatial and temporal distribution of crashes on the campuses and their immediate periphery. To account for underreporting of pedestrian and bicycle crashes, we developed and circulated an online survey, which helped...

Safety Assessment of Uncontrolled Intersections Using Both Conflict Probability and Severity

Ma, Yingying
Qin, Xiaoran
Grembek, Offer
Chen, Zhiwei
2016

This paper presents a method to assess the safety of uncontrolled intersections considering both conflict probability and severity, which are two major properties of traffic conflicts. This method provides not only the safety level of the entire intersection but also the distribution of safety within intersections. Intersections are modelled by a two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system and the internal space of intersections is divided into cells. Firstly, vehicle movement characteristics of at uncontrolled intersections are modelled. Secondly, conflict probability of each cell within...

Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Research Brief

Barajas, Jesus M.
2016

As cities around the country adopt initiatives like Vision Zero to eliminate traffic deaths and serious injuries, they are faced with the question of how effective different types of interventions are. For example, do protected bike lanes or painted sharrows reduce the risk of severe injury to cyclists? A group of researchers from the New York University School of Medicine examined this question by studying where cyclists admitted to the hospital crashed and how severe their injuries were. This research brief explores their findings.

Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety Research Brief

Barajas, Jesus M.
2017

In January 2017, over 13,000 transportation professionals gathered in Washington, DC, at the Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board (TRB). In all, there were over 5,000 research presentations, 600 of which were about transportation safety. In this brief, we highlight some of the newest practice-ready pedestrian and bicycle safety research to come out of the conference.

SafeTREC Traffic Safety Facts: Pedestrian Safety

Chen, Katherine L.
Tsai, Bor-Wen
Fortin, Garrett
Cooper, Jill F.
2018

Everyone is a pedestrian, whether or not walking is one’s primary mode of travel, and as a commute mode, walking is gaining in numbers. Nearly 16 pedestrians died every day, averaging a pedestrian every 1.5 hours, in traffic collisions in 2016. Pedestrian fatalities increased 27.4 percent from 2007 to 2016 while other traffic deaths decreased 13.9 percent. In 2016, the number of pedestrian fatalities was at its highest one-year level since 1990. California was one of five states (along with Florida, Texas, New York, and Arizona) which reported more than 100 pedestrian deaths and...