Pedestrians

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.

Expansion factors based on the trends in long-term count data are useful tools for estimating daily, weekly, or annual volumes from short-term counts, but it is unclear how to differentiate locations by activity pattern. This paper compares two approaches to developing factor groups for hour-to-week pedestrian count expansion factors. The land use (LU) classification approach assumes that surrounding LUs affect the pedestrian activity at a location, and it is easy to apply to short-term count locations based on identifiable attributes of the site. The empirical clustering (EC) approach...

Over the last decade in California there has been a surge in the number of traffic fatalities, with especially large increases in pedestrian fatalities. At the same time, the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has affirmed a vision of reaching zero fatalities and serious injuries on state highways by 2050 and has committed the department to reaching this goal by adopting the Safe System Approach. The Safe System Approach is underpinned by the principles that humans make mistakes and that the transportation system should be designed to account for the human body’s ability to...

From a transport perspective, increasing active travel –and walking in particular– is crucial for the future of sustainable cities, as reflected in global decarbonisation policies and agendas. Further, walking is much more than a mere mode of transport: it provides a fundamental social function, fostering vibrant cohesive communities. Arguably, walking and its associated infrastructure –sidewalks– should rank among the highest priorities for planning authorities. However, efficiency- and speed-driven urbanisation has gradually reallocated street space to private cars, leading to...