Summary

Pedestrian deaths account for 18.5% of California's traffic fatalities. Vehicle collisions in 2001 were responsible for 721 pedestrian deaths (or 18.4 percent of all traffic-related deaths) and 14,545 pedestrian injuries (or 4.8 percent of all traffic injuries). Currently, significant resources are focused on countermeasures that aim to reduce the risk of pedestrian injury. To make efficient use of limited resources, interventions must be targeted at areas with high pedestrian collision rates. Unfortunately, creating reliable estimates of pedestrian collision rates is impossible without adequate information about pedestrian exposure to accidents. There is currently no systematic and accessible method that is widely used to estimate pedestrian exposure. The goal of the project is to develop tools for estimating pedestrian risk for injury, with the objective of developing a method or set of methods for estimating pedestrian volume for calculation of pedestrian accident rates in California. Such tools include definitions of exposure and risk, methods for measurement, and analytic techniques. The motivation for such tools resides in the fact that assessing pedestrian exposure and is critical to understand trends and patterns in pedestrian injuries, for identifying causal and contributing factors, and for development and evaluation of countermeasures. Reliable information on pedestrian exposure to injury should improve transportation safety, efficiency, and effectiveness

Research Plan

We intend to develop methods for measuring pedestrian exposure that are both accurate and efficient. First, we will specify clearly what we want to measure; i.e., how we define pedestrian risk. Secondly, we will develop a methodology for how pedestrian risk should be measured. We aim to produce a protocol for assessing pedestrian exposure that can be used directly by traffic engineers and others engineers and others to assess pedestrian exposure. To accomplish that we have the following specific objectives:

• Develop a conceptual framework and definitions for pedestrian exposure
• Review, test, and evaluate and test manual and video counting methods.
• Develop a prototype for a pedestrian exposure database that could be maintained by agencies at various levels (neighborhood, city, corridor, state)
• Develop and test formal protocol and training presentation for measuring pedestrian exposure.
• Review and test automated counting methods. If such methods prove to be efficient and useful we will include them in the protocol

• Decide where to collect data
• Decide exactly what data to collect
• Decide which counting instrument or approach is best for the location,
• Decide how many observations to make and when to make them,
• Calculate daily/weekly/monthly/yearly pedestrians volumes (by total count, or by time/distance exposure measures) for your location, determine how to aggregate data to get overall walking rates of a larger area (corridor, town, county, state