In the last decade, there has been an increased focus in California on encouraging children to walk and bicycle to school safely. In 1999, the California Legislature created the Safe Routes to School (SR2S) program, authorizing issuance of a competitive grant process for roadway construction projects. There has been an overall decline in the numbers of child pedestrian/bicyclist collisions in California as a whole. When compared with the control areas, the SR2S project areas did not show a greater decline in numbers of collisions. However, it is likely that the number of children walking/...
Bicycle volume data are useful to practitioners and researchers to understand safety, travel behavior, and development impacts. This paper describes the methodology used to develop several simple models of bicycle intersection volumes in Alameda County, California. The models are based on two-hour bicycle counts performed at a sample of 81 intersections in the Spring of 2008 and 2009. Study sites represented areas with a wide range of population density, employment density, proximity to commercial property, neighborhood income, and street network characteristics. The explanatory variables...
Routes to School National Partnership (Partnership) founded the Local School Project (Project) in 2008 to assist ten schools in lowincome communities to: 1) develop and evaluate a school-based SRTS program, 2) build local capacity to apply for state or federal SRTS funding, and 3) increase safe walking and bicycling to and from the school and in the community. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Kaiser Permanente, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation provided funding for the Project.This report presents the results, lessons learned and recommendations identified during the...
The high level of pedestrian, bicycle, and transit activity on city-owned streets surrounding the UC Berkeley campus creates a dynamic social environment and gives Berkeley much of its charm. But the streets around the campus (henceforth called the campus periphery) are also places where pedestrians and bicyclists have been injured or killed in collisions with automobiles. This creates liability for drivers, the City, and the University—and worse, causes suffering for crash victims and their families. Everyone has an interest in reducing the frequency and severity of pedestrian and bicycle...
This paper reports on research conducted by the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center and sponsored by the California Department of Transportation (“Caltrans”) to establish performance measures for pedestrian and bicycle safety and mobility along urban arterials. Although historically focused on motorized vehicle mobility, Caltrans has recently joined in a national trend to incorporate non-motorized transportation and community-level outcomes into transportation decision-making frameworks, an approach known as "Complete Streets." Recognizing that its current performance...
This paper presents a new method for forecasting cyclist volume and route choice based on space syntax techniques for urban analysis. Space syntax has been shown to correlate strongly with pedestrian and vehicular trips in a number of international studies, but little research to date has focused on the role of urban form and street network design in cyclist route choice. This paper addresses this gap by analyzing the distribution of cycling trips in the central London area, focusing on a sample of work-based commuting trips. A sample of 423 cyclists from 50 organizations was combined with...
This report presents the results from a multiyear effort to develop and test performance measures for evaluating the impact of landscaping and roadside features on pedestrian and bicyclist safety and mobility and economic vitality for Caltrans’ urban arterial network. The first phase of the study was a literature review, and the second phase focused on developing performance measures. The third and fourth phases focused on testing the proposed performance measures consisting of an infrastructure analysis, policy review, safety analysis and a pedestrian and bicyclist intercept survey on two...
Methods for identifying sites with potential for preventing traffic fatalities and injuries have been developed for vehicle-vehicle collisions. This study was funded by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) to develop methods for identifying sites where there is potential for significant reductions in pedestrian and bicyclist injury. Data from 1998-2007 from a 16.5-mile section of San Pablo Avenue (SR 123) in the San Francisco East Bay was used as a study area. Several approaches for identifying sites with high potential for reducing pedestrian and bicyclist injury were...
Traffic safety decisions are based predominantly on information from police collision reports. However, a number of studies suggest that such reports tend to underrepresent bicycle and pedestrian collisions. Underreporting could lead to inaccurate evaluation of crash rates and may under- or overestimate the effects of road safety countermeasures. This review examined ten studies that used data linkage to explore potential underreporting of pedestrian and/or bicyclist injury in police collision reports. Due to variations in definitions of reporting level, periods of study, and study...
In this paper we use a case study approach to examine how airport operators are addressing bicycle access to their properties and the motivations and obstacles they face, in light of new policies to integrate bicycles, along with transit and walking, into transportation planning, design and construction, and to increase bicycles’ role in the transportation system. Eight influential elements emerged from our review of policy documents and research literature. We used them to guide interviews with key informants. The eight elements are: governance structure, location, access roads, self-...
