01624317

Component

Active travel contributes to the sustainability of regions and the health of its inhabitants, but only safe roads for pedestrians and cyclists guarantee the achievement of these benefits. This study focuses on the safety of pedestrians and looks at mitigating and aggravating factors that are associated with the injury severity of pedestrians when they experience crashes with another road user. In particular, this study overcomes existing limitations in the literature by posing the attention on the built environment and considering the spatial correlation across crashes. Crash data for 6539 pedestrian crashes occurred in Denmark between 2006 and 2015 were merged with geographic information system resources containing detailed information about built environment and exposure at the crash locations. A linearized spatial logit model allowed estimating the probability of the pedestrian sustaining a severe or fatal injury conditional on the occurrence of a collision with another road user. This study confirms previous findings about older and intoxicated pedestrians being the most vulnerable, collisions with heavy vehicles leading to the most severe consequences, and roads with higher speed limits being related to the most severe outcomes. This study provides novel perspectives by showing positive spatial correlation that implies clustering of crashes with the same severity outcome. Also, this study highlights the need for thinking about traffic calming measures for making easier for pedestrians to cross and road users to approach, illumination for mitigating the difficulties related to the darkest hours, road surface maintenance in particular in the event of precipitation, and reduction of speed limits in particular in rural areas. Moreover, this study stresses the role of the built environment in the proximity of the crash and suggests that awareness is the key, as shopping areas, residential areas, low speed roads, and walking traffic density are positively related to a reduction in pedestrian injury severity. All these areas have in common a large mass of pedestrians that make other road users more aware and attentive, but the same does not seem to apply in less dense areas.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB20 Standing Committee on Safety Data, Analysis and Evaluation.

01618707

17-01831

English

16p

2017

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Maps; References (41) ; Tables

Built environment; Crash injuries; Cyclists; Injury severity; Pedestrian safety; Traffic calming; Vulnerable road users

Denmark

Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-01831

PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 8 2016 10:38AM