Safety Prioritization Tool for Sidewalk and Bike-Lane Gaps

Pedestrian sidewalks and bicycle lanes in Florida are not continuous, and there is a concern among planners and engineers in the FDOT that these gaps constitute discontinuity of flow and are potentially posing threats to pedestrian and bicycle safety. Before these agencies attempt to develop a prioritization program to decide on which gaps need to be addressed, it was logical to carry out an analysis that investigates the correlation between safety and sidewalk/bicycle-lane gaps. The previous research concluded that absence of sidewalk along roadway segments is one of the main factors that have a significant impact on the expected number of pedestrian crashes at a specific location. This paper builds on the previous task’s results to develop a safety prioritization tool to address the gaps. The developed tool takes into account the above-mentioned parameters as well as other pedestrian-related activity variables and proximity to generators using land use, income, and auto ownership data. The prioritization method was based on a multi-criterion ordinal ranking of the parameters of five main modules, using a scoring system that combines all criteria weights then aggregates them into a single indicator. The five main modules comprise roadway and traffic data, socioeconomic data, land use data, transit, and crash data. The need for roadway segment safety improvement was ranked according to its roadway pedestrian safety indicator (RPSI) threshold and categorized into five categories. The Sidewalk/Bike-Lane Gaps Safety Prioritization Tool (SBLPT) has the capability to generate sidewalk/bike-lane gap maps that can be viewed in Google Earth ®.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANB10 Standing Committee on Transportation Safety Management.
• Authors:
  • Abou-Senna, Hatem
  • Radwan, Essam
  • Mohamed, Ayman
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Maps; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 20p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bicycle lanes; Pedestrian areas; Pedestrian safety; Safety; Sidewalks
• Geographic Terms: Florida
• Subject Areas: Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01661614
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-05479
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 28 2018 5:00PM