Safety measures for older pedestrians
Federal guidelines recommend that transportation agencies calculate how much time to give pedestrians to cross intersections that have traffic lights using an average walking speed of 3.5 feet per second. If pedestrians who walk slower or use wheelchairs routinely cross particular intersections, the Federal Highway Administration recommends transportation agencies use a walking speed of less than 3.5 feet per second.
Observational research indicates it’s unlikely older pedestrians can cross a street at a speed of 3.5 feet per second. A 2017 study published in Innovation in Aging found that among a sample of 1,191 people over age 60 in Sao Paulo, Brazil, nearly 96% walked slower than 3.5 feet per second.
An October 2019 paper in Accident Analysis and Prevention examines pedestrian crashes in Los Angeles from 2015 to 2017, specifically 2,471 crashes with pedestrians over age 65 and 11,373 crashes with pedestrians under age 65. The author identifies several infrastructure improvements that can improve safety for older pedestrians.
These include raised medians -- islands in the center of a road that separate traffic, giving pedestrians a defined, safe place to stop while crossing wider roads. Three-way intersections are also safer for older pedestrians because they feature “less complex configuration and traffic flow” compared with four-way intersections. Tree-lined streets also help, as they may protect pedestrians while “providing pedestrians and drivers with a clear definition of roadways and sidewalks,” the author writes.
However, crosswalks make intersections safer for pedestrians under age 65, not those over age 65, a finding which “seems to reflect the fact that elderly pedestrians are discouraged from crossing roads and avoid jaywalking at the intersections with missing crosswalks,” the author writes. Likewise, decorative crosswalks -- for example, those painted for Pride month -- seem to benefit younger pedestrians more than older pedestrians, according to the paper.
Research on crosswalk design
Transportation agencies may rely on a variety of high- and low-tech tools to improve pedestrian safety at crosswalks, including lighting, video cameras, signs and flags.
A June 2020 nationwide review of research published in the 2000s and 2010s and conducted by researchers at the Louisiana Transportation Research Center finds the most common lighting treatments are overhead lights, in-road flashing lights and lights on bollards, which are short metal or concrete posts sometimes used to separate oncoming traffic or to define sidewalks.
Several factors, such as speeding and poor lighting, contribute to pedestrian crashes, the literature review finds. The authors find few studies on how adding lighting affects vehicle crashes, and none on how new lights affected pedestrian crash numbers.
Studies that examine driver and pedestrian behavior show crosswalk lighting makes drivers more likely to yield to pedestrians -- and pedestrians more aware of their surroundings.
Other studies based on models aimed at predicting the probability of crashes at crosswalks “reveal that providing adequate lighting at midblock and intersection crosswalks is associated with lower probability of pedestrian fatalities and severe injuries,” the authors write.
Existing law enforcement cameras at intersections may make crosswalks safer for pedestrians. The authors of a March 2022 paper in the Journal of Safety Research studied four crosswalks without traffic lights in Nanjing, China. They learned that when cameras were present, fewer drivers drove aggressively -- for example, speeding up toward an intersection and nearly hitting crossing pedestrians.
There are lower-cost options for transportation agencies that want make crosswalks safer where they live. An August 2019 paper in the journal Sustainability examines if crossing flags at intersections affect whether drivers yield to pedestrians.
The authors write that crossing flags are “brightly colored, typically plastic, reusable flags” pedestrians carry across the roadway then leave in a bucket on the other side. In examining 160 crossings in Las Vegas, those with flags were less likely to have drivers go through a crosswalk when a pedestrian was already in the roadway, and more likely to yield to a pedestrian waiting on the sidewalk.
Gateways are another low-cost option for improving pedestrian safety. These are inexpensive, reflective signs several feet tall meant to alert drivers approaching a crosswalk.
The authors of a June 2020 paper in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis studied gateways in Three Rivers, Michigan, concluding that “this type of set up would be ideal for a ‘Main Street’ setting where there is a downtown area with a high pedestrian and vehicle traffic count with several crosswalks. The gateway intervention could be deployed at the first intersection of each way of travel, therefore creating a corridor of safe crosswalks for that stretch of roadway.”
The news media and pedestrian safety
An experimental study published in December 2019 in the journal Transportation Research Interdisciplinary Perspectives examines whether news coverage of traffic crashes affects how readers assign blame for those crashes -- was it the driver’s fault, the pedestrian’s, or due to something else?
“The field of media studies has consistently demonstrated that news coverage meaningfully shapes public perceptions,” the authors write. For their experiment, the authors recruited a nationally representative sample of 999 people and divided them into three groups, each assigned to read different versions of a fictional, local news article about a vehicle-pedestrian crash.
The first version of the article insinuated the pedestrian was at fault. It used the term “accident” and phrasing such as “a pedestrian struck by a car,” and noted the pedestrian was “wearing dark clothing” when “he was struck.”
