Pedestrian Safety for Urban Planners (and Users)
Pedestrian safety: why does it matter?
It’s a concrete jungle out there. There are 60 accidents in the US each day where a vehicle runs into a storefront, and approximately 430 people go to emergency in the same time frame for traffic-related pedestrian injuries.
Whether you walk to work, swing by the grocery store to pick up dinner, or shuffle to the curb in your slippers to grab the newspaper, almost everyone is a pedestrian at some point during their day. Pedestrian safety is a problem that’s more complicated to solve than simply issuing a reminder to look both ways before crossing the street.
Why do pedestrians get hit by cars?
The biggest threat to pedestrian safety is visibility: accidents are most likely to happen during winter, nighttime, and rainy or snowy weather, all of which can make it difficult for drivers to see. Accidents do occur more frequently in certain places, however, and municipalities and businesses are aware of the problem. They install infrastructure to improve pedestrian safety, including light-controlled crosswalks, bollards, speed reader boards, and other traffic barriers.
Intersections
Some of the most common places where accidents occur are at intersections. Cars are speeding up or slowing down to make lights, and gauging other vehicles’ speeds to make left or right turns. Sometimes pedestrians can get caught up (all too literally) in the mix.
Urban planners and engineers have a few options to make intersections safer. Have you ever seen a flashing green traffic light? That means that pedestrians, not cars, control the signal. While many intersections of two busy streets already have lights, intersections where one street has much heavier traffic than the other can use pedestrian activated signals to make the crossings safer. We’ve all seen — or been — that person running across the street to beat oncoming traffic on a two-way stop sign junction. A pedestrian-activated signal lets the person push a button, change the light, and then cross more safely.
For intersections with existing vehicle-controlled lights, there are additional measures that can make crossing safer for foot traffic. Lights can be timed to create leading pedestrian intervals, meaning that pedestrians have a head start on cars — discouraging cars from hitting the gas to make their turns before pedestrians enter the crosswalk. Countdown signal timers on crosswalks also help pedestrians gauge whether or not they have time to make the crossing, and the beeping of audible pedestrian signals can help catch the attention of a cell phone zombie.
Parking Lots
Not all pedestrian safety measures have to be as expensive or attention-grabbing as traffic lights and flashing red hands. Though parking lots aren’t (usually) high-speed zones, they are full of pedestrians and vehicles making erratic, unpredictable movements. Because of this architects install infrastructure designed to keep pedestrians and property from getting hit by errant vehicles and runaway shopping carts.
Those seemingly decorative iron columns outside parks and museums, concrete balls near storefronts and steel pipes in parking lots? Those are called bollards. They guide where people should walk — and create boundaries that cars can’t cross over. Architects and urban planners choose to install bollards around businesses (including stores, restaurants and hotels) and municipal areas (such as parks, libraries and government buildings) for added storefront and pedestrian protection against accidents and crime.
Architects and urban planners will select a style of bollard that will complement the area. At the store next door or a few blocks down the road, you may see a different style of bollard, intended to be more cohesive with the neighborhood’s feel or the company’s branding. Though the goal of pedestrian safety doesn’t change, urban planners and architects want something that can be easily updated as the surrounding area grows or changes.
Concrete bollards are a basic, natural-looking method of increasing pedestrian safety by guiding pedestrians and traffic, and preventing vehicles from mounting the curb.
A similar method; plastic bollards are actually steel posts covered with a protective layer of plastic. The steel posts provide pedestrian safety & crash protection while bollard covers can be used to reduce maintenance, increase visibility, and can easily and inexpensively be updated as needed to fit with the local streetscape.
In addition to concrete and plastic, bollards can be made of iron, aluminum, stainless steel, polyurethane and a number of other materials.
Arterial Roads
Arterial roads are major streets that connect low to medium traffic areas, such as residential neighborhoods, to high traffic routes, such as highways. They tend to have large volumes of vehicles traveling at high speeds, long distances between cross streets, and sidewalks. In addition, public transit routes often travel along these arterial corridors, creating potentially unexpected vehicle patterns — and requiring the occasional commuter to run for the bus.
The combination of foot traffic and long distances between crossings leads to jaywalking, and, unfortunately, accidents involving pedestrians. To discourage people from crossing the street mid-block, municipal engineers and urban planners have a few options.
One favorite is to insert a greenbelt barrier. This can be placed in-between lanes of opposing traffic down the middle of the road, immediately along the sidewalk, or next to a bike lane. Urban planners and landscapers can use a line of planters, rows of bushes, or even densely planted flowers to make the area look nice — and to discourage people from running across the street in the middle of a block. Instead, pedestrians are indirectly shepherded toward the intended (and safer) marked crossings. Signage on the side of the street reminding people to cross at appropriate crosswalks are also gentle reminders for them to be safe.
Other options that can separate pedestrians from traffic and discourage jaywalking are standard fencing or jersey barriers, the concrete barriers often used to separate directions of traffic on a highway. These are less visually pleasing than greenbelts, however, and municipalities often try to avoid placing them within cities.
Safety is all around
Being a pedestrian comes with risks, but many of us spend very little time worrying about being hit by a car when we leave our houses. Part of the reason we can do that is because engineers, urban planners, and architects have created and installed infrastructure of varying subtlety to keep us safe.
So next time you’re out walking around, keep one eye on the landscape for pedestrian protection infrastructure — it’s everywhere. Take a second to appreciate the style and placement of that bollard; the button that stops traffic when you need to cross the road; the greenbelt preventing you from jaywalking mid-block. They’re keeping you safe.
