Laura Rampersad, PE, October 2022
Pedestrian Safety: Can’t Fix What You Don’t See
According to NHTSA, there was a pedestrian fatality every 81 minutes in 2021. While the effort to invest in roadway safety improvements have flattened the curve for vehicle – vehicle crashes, pedestrian fatalities and severe crashes dramatically increased over the past decade. Fatalities increased 70% in a single year from 2020 to 2021. The majority of the crashes have one thing in common – time of day. As industry experts take a closer look at the trends and the potential factors, visibility in the evening hours has found to be the key issue. The traditional approaches to pedestrian safety are not effective in tacking this condition. A fresh, new approach is needed to improve pedestrian safety.
In the last decade, communities are adapting to accommodate more pedestrians and bicycles on streets for commute and recreation purposes. There has been a significant shift in the way FHWA has formed their design directives. Pedestrians and bicyclists have elevated in priority, treated as equal users of roadways. Two of the three new countermeasures for 2021 focus on pedestrians in crossing zones. Crosswalk visibility enhancements use lighting, enhanced pavement markings, and gateways to alert drivers to these critical areas. The rectangular rapid flashing beacons adds an alert to the existing signage and are installed at crossing areas with high number of pedestrians. The documented safety benefits attributed to crosswalk visibility enhancements are 40% reduction of pedestrian injury crashes in high-visibility crosswalks. Intersection lighting can reduce pedestrian crashes up to 42%. Finally, advance yield or stop markings and signs can reduce pedestrian crashes up to 25%.
Pedestrians and cyclists are set to benefit greatly from these new safety investments. Finding ways to keep pedestrians and bicyclists at the forefront of intersection design is critical to stop the growing number of pedestrian fatalities. Installing higher quality lighting, enhanced signage and pavement markings at crossing areas can improve visibility of pedestrians to drivers, providing the most optimal setting for safety. LED fixtures are the preferred lighting choice for new design and retrofits because of the higher quality of light and energy savings. Municipalities are also converting their traffic signals to LEDs as well. Both decisions provide significant cost ongoing operations, recovering their investment in short time. With the passing of the IIJA, individual municipalities and Metropolitan Planning Organizations (MPO’s) have $9B to implement FHWA Countermeasures and $550M to upgrade their lighting.
Why are our Intersections less safe for pedestrians?
Across the entire United States, there has been a dramatic increase in serious and fatal crashes involving pedestrians. The rate increased 60% over the past decade. According to NHTSA, there was a pedestrian fatality every 81 minutes in 2021. The number of pedestrian fatalities increased 70% from 2020 to 2021. While the effort to invest in roadway safety improvements have flattened the curve for vehicle – vehicle crashes, pedestrian fatalities and severe crashes dramatically increased over same time period. Fatalities increased 20% in 2020 and another 70% in 2021. The majority of the crashes have one thing in common – time of day.
In the last decade, communities are adapting their streets to accommodate more pedestrians and bicycles on their streets for commute and recreation. At the end of May, the FHWA released pedestrian lighting primer for designers to provide proper lighting levels for pedestrians. This long, awaited document, provides design professionals a one-stop resource for designing facilities for safety and security of pedestrians. This includes retrofitting existing facilities as well as actively incorporating pedestrian needs in new construction.
Historically, inadequate municipal funding was the hurdle to incorporate lighting and safety prevention elements for pedestrians and cyclists into road design project. However, the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act (IIJA) has increased funding for non-motorized vehicles and pedestrians. Initiatives like Complete Streets encourage designers to consider all users of the roadway. This bill includes $11 billion to fund transportation safety programs, including highway safety, truck safety, and pipeline and hazardous material safety. This includes $5 billion to create the Safe Streets for All program to help reduce crashes and fatalities, especially for cyclists and pedestrians. Most importantly, the IIJA requires that project spending include safety improvements to the tune of 15%. The safety improvements can include lighting improvements.
It’s on Pedestrians to Navigate Dangerous Intersections
In the past, pedestrians and cyclists took a back seat to vehicles in roadway design. Accommodations at intersections were frequently limited to painted crosswalks. In areas of higher pedestrian traffic areas, the intersections may have pedestrian signals that provide a small segment of the traffic signal timing pattern to permit crossing. Previous and current efforts to protect pedestrians on our streets focused on pedestrian education, providing instruction to wear reflective clothing, increasing awareness when crossing the street, and using extreme caution at night.
Municipal police, sheriffs and state police tabulate and recorded crash data. However, the data for incidents involving pedestrians is often inconsistently reported from location to location. This results in municipal safety officers being unable to justify safety improvements at dangerous intersections. Traffic Engineers require accurate data in order to recommend solutions to the issue improving pedestrian safety. Proactive safety improvements have been incorporated in some communities, in areas where there are high pedestrian volumes. Some recent safety improvements include enhanced crosswalks, flashing beacon signage, pedestrian refuge islands as part of complete street reconstruction, and midblock LED crossing devices. All of these efforts have been designed to better delineate crossing areas.
Two important safety elements in intersection design are lighting and traffic signals. Ironically, these two designs continue to be completed independent of each other even though both industry segments have converted to energy, efficient LED lights. Each element continues to follow past funding models where lighting installations and operations are managed by private utilities, while traffic signals are funded and maintained by municipal crews.
Roadway lighting provides minimum standard for vehicles by spacing fixtures evenly along the roadway. At intersections, there may be one or two high mast light poles or just one simple hanging fixture centered in the intersection. Too frequently this leads to dark, shadowed areas where pedestrians wait to cross. Inclusion of separate pedestrian signals and the direct access to interrupt signal program to provide crossing has shown to improve pedestrian safety when incorporated.
Visibility is the Key
The FHWA has developed a series of 28 proven safety countermeasures and strategies effective in reducing roadway fatalities and serious injuries on our Nation’s highways. Transportation agencies are strongly encouraged to consider widespread implementation of PSCs to accelerate the achievement of local, State, and National safety goals. FHWA has created 8 Pedestrian/Bicyclist Countermeasures:
Figure 1 FHWA-SA-21-082 Proven Safety Countermeasures for Pedestrian/cyclists
Two of the 3 newly published countermeasures focus on pedestrians in crossing zones. Crosswalk visibility enhancements use lighting, enhanced pavement markings, and gateways to alert drivers to these critical areas. The rectangular rapid flashing beacons ads an alert to the existing signage installed at crossing areas with high number of pedestrians. The documented safety benefits attributed to crosswalk visibility enhancements show a 40% reduction in pedestrian injury crashes at/in high-visibility crosswalks. Intersection lighting can reduce pedestrian crashes up to 42%. Finally, advance yield or stop markings and signs can reduce pedestrian crashes up to 25%.
The previously identified countermeasures make changes to road design, traffic signals, and traffic signage to give additional safety measures to pedestrians and cyclists. Changes to physical infrastructure are part of such as forming refuge islands at intersections break up long length of crosswalks and delineate lanes for cyclists. New technology continues to improve signals and timing priority that pedestrians receive as well as the alerts that drivers get to designate a crossing zone.
FHWA added Lighting as a Crosscutting Countermeasures. Providing more uniform lighting along roadways and additional lighting at intersections has shown to be effective in reducing crashes. Intersections can be made safer for pedestrians by adding light where history of crashes at nighttime, traffic volume, the volume of non-motorized users, the presence of crosswalks and raised medians, and the presence of transit stops and boarding volumes. Upgrades to high-quality, energy efficient LED lighting has provided designers with greater control on level and direction of lighting. The light is just not illuminating a roadway, but also serve other desires of stakeholders like eliminating crash disparities, connecting to essential neighborhood services, improving active transportation routes, and promoting personal safety.
Large municipalities have begun the converting/retrofitting roadway lighting and traffic signals to LED systems. LEDs are expected to account for 2/3 (66%) of the 150 million streetlights in the near future. Boston, Seattle and New York City have undertaken big retrofits. In 2017, New York launched a $76 million project, which was the largest in the country: replacing 250,000 lights. City officials expect to reap $14 million in energy and maintenance spending per year.
New Funding Shines the Light on the Real Issue
FHWA is committed through multiple programs and initiatives to reverse the trend in pedestrian and bicycle deaths. Stopping the clock on pedestrian crashes through new initiatives like Safe Streets or All and Vision Zero represents a national and world-wide, focus to curb current trends. FHWA has prioritized crosswalk visibility and lighting solution countermeasures to address the significant increase in serious and fatal pedestrian crashes over the past decade. Traffic Engineers have new directives to include all users in roadways and intersections design. It is no longer solely on pedestrian to manage their own interaction with a increasingly more dangerous roadway. The complete street design concept is a more proactive approach to redesign the roadway and incorporate protected and refuge areas within the pavement. Municipalities are implementing road diets to reducing priority on vehicles, reallocation of existing paved areas for cycling commuters. Upgrades to existing lighting and adding lighting to new areas assists pedestrians in moving safely and provides drivers more opportunity to identify pedestrians in critical areas like crossing zones.
Municipalities are also able to improve roadway lighting through energy saving initiatives that come with funding. LED fixtures are the preferred lighting choice for new design and retrofits because of the higher quality of light and the energy savings. Municipalities are also converting their traffic signals to LEDs as well. Both decisions provide significant cost savings on ongoing operations, recovering their investment in short time. With the passing of the IIJA, municipalities and MPO’s have $9B to implement FHWA Countermeasures and $550M to reduce energy use, reduce fossil fuel emissions, and improve energy efficiency like upgrading their lighting.
Pedestrians and cyclists will benefit greatly from these new safety investments. Finding ways to keep pedestrians and bicyclists at the forefront of intersection design is critical to stop the growing number of fatalities. Installing higher quality lighting, enhanced signage and pavement markings at crossing areas can improve visibility of pedestrians to drivers, providing the most optimal setting for safety.
Source citation
“Know the Basics – 8 walking Safety Tip” NHTSA. Web. 2021 < http://www. https://www.nhtsa.gov/road-safety/pedestrian-safety>.
Zeeger et al. Development of Crash Modification Factors for Uncontrolled Pedestrian Crossing Treatments, FHWA, (2017).
“FHWA studies and Countermeasures” FHWA-SA-21-049. Web. 2021 <https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/provencountermeasures/crosswalk-visibility.cfm>.
Wang, Ucilia. “Switch to LED Street Lighting and market size – How LEDs Are Going To Change The Way We Look At Cities” Sep. 2014. <https://www.forbes.com/sites/uciliawang/2014/09/10/bright-lights-big-profits/?sh=45c427fe50ba>.
“Zero Deaths and Safe System” FHWA Web. March 2022. <https://highways.dot.gov/safety/zero-deaths>,