Finding Strategies to Improve Pedestrian Safety in Rural Areas
Source: United States Department of Transportation, Connecticut Transportation Institute
Pedestrian safety is a serious problem nationwide. This problem is far from confined to urban areas; every year, several hundred pedestrians are injured or killed in traffic accidents in rural parts of New England. In Maine, which is a mostly rural state, roughly twelve percent of the states traffic facilities are pedestrians and the majority of these fatalities occur in rural areas.
The objective of this research is to study the safety of pedestrian crossings in rural areas to discover factors that help explain high rates of collisions involving pedestrians crossing the road. The following environmental and exposure factors are considered: population density; type of pedestrian crossing; traffic control used at the crossing, surrounding land use type, highway facility type, vehicle travel speed, vehicle volume, pedestrian volume.
