Pedestrians

The primary objective of this paper is to review the appropriate use of ratio variables in the study of pedestrian injury exposure. We provide a discussion that rejects the assumption that the relationship between a random variable (e.g., a population X) and a ratio (e.g., injury or disease per population Y/X) is necessarily negative. In the study of pedestrian risk, the null hypothesis is that pedestrian injury risk is constant with respect to pedestrian volume. This study employs a unique data set containing the number of pedestrian collisions, average annual pedestrian volume, average...

Network screening techniques are widely used by state agencies to identify locations with high collision concentration, also referred to as hotspots. However, most of the research in this regard has focused on identifying highway segments that are of concern to automobile collisions. A major difference between pedestrian and automobile hotspots is that pedestrian-based conflicts are more likely to arise in localized regions, such as near intersections, mid-blocks, and/or other crossings, as opposed to along long stretches of roadway. Hence, in order to address this issue, a dynamic...

Over the past year, the San Francisco Department of Parking and Traffic (DPT) conducted an intensive pedestrian-safety engineering study, the PedSafe Study. PedSafe was funded by the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)*, which also funded companion studies in Las Vegas and Miami. The study was designed to analyze pedestrian injuries by zones (i.e., neighborhoods or districts) and to identify those most amenable to prevention efforts. The DPT expects to utilize the methodology and information from the PedSafe study to help shape a citywide pedestrian master plan. This paper describes the...

Automated methods are commonly used to count motorized vehicles, but are not frequently used to count pedestrians. This is because the automated technologies available to count pedestrians are not very developed, and their effectiveness hasnot been widely researched. Moreover, most automated methods are used primarilyfor the purpose of detecting, rather than counting, pedestrians (Dharmaraju et al.,2001; Noyce and Dharmaraju, 2002; Noyce et al., 2006). Automated pedestrian counting technologies are attractive because they have the potential to reduce the labor costs associated with manual...