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Improving the denominator of safety rankings for bicycle and pedestrian safety
Abstract:
<p>In order to accurately measure variation in biking and pedestrian safety it is necessary to measure both the number of crashes as well as exposure, a measure of those vulnerable to potential crashes. Including exposure in bicycling and pedestrian crash risk is difficult because few cities have robust data on pedestrian and biking volumes. Given lack of data, modelling approaches are helpful for representing exposure. The goal of this paper is to model pedestrian and bicycling exposure for large cities and counties in California and demonstrate how representations of bicycle and pedestrian safety change when exposure is included in safety rankings. Specifically, we evaluated how including exposure impacted safety rankings generated by California Office of Traffic Safety (OTS), which distributes funding that increases road safety. We measured exposure as miles walked/biked per road mile using a validated model and data from the U.S. Census, National Household Travel Survey, Open Street Map, and Statewide Integrated Traffic Records System. Next we performed linear regression analysis in which the predictor is exposure and the outcome is bike/pedestrian crashes. The residual values and signs were used to rank regions based on safety. The most significant change in OTS ranks was for pedestrian safety in the city of San Francisco that was previously ranked as 3/15 (very unsafe) and with the modified rankings is now 15/15 (most safe). Our study demonstrates when normalizing crash risk using exposure, cities/counties that were previously considered unsafe can be reassessed as safer and vice versa.</p>
Keywords: exposure, crash risk, safety rankings, active transportation, spatial analysis
Authors:
Caitlyn J Linehan, University of California, Santa Barbara; Submitting Author / Primary Presenter
Trisalyn Nelson, University of California, Santa Barbara; Co-Author (this author will not present)
Achituv Cohen, University of California, Santa Barbara; Co-Author (this author will not present)
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Improving the denominator of safety rankings for bicycle and pedestrian safety
Category
In-Person Paper Abstract