An assessment of two pedestrian safety inventories

Abstract

Pedestrian safety inventories for auditing roadway features and infrastructure are a promising way to rapidly assess pedestrian injury likelihood in a city location, particularly when the auditor can score the location remotely via tools such as Google Street View (GSV). This study provided a preliminary assessment of whether two remote assessment inventories were as reliable as in-person auditing, and whether the two tools were associated with pedestrian safety measures. The researchers repeatedly performed crossings at six locations to collect safety outcome data. For the safety inventories, one team of coders scored the locations in-person, and a separate team of coders scored the locations in GSV. Analyses indicated generally good agreement between the in-person and GSV scores, and a significant relationship between the inventory scores and driver yielding/stopping rate to the crossing pedestrians. The two inventories were predictive for different reasons, and future research will further assess and refine them.

Keywords: Pedestrian Injury, Traffic Safety, Human Factors, Surface Transportation, Infrastructure

DOI: 10.54941/ahfe1005242