Mid-Block Pedestrian Crossing Exposure: Count Protocol and Database

Nearly 80% of US pedestrian fatalities occur at mid-block locations, away from intersections. Despite the problem of the most serious pedestrian crashes occurring at mid-block locations, very few transportation researchers and agencies have collected pedestrian crossing counts at these locations. Therefore, the traffic safety profession has almost no understanding of pedestrian exposure at mid-block crossing locations. This prevents researchers and agencies from calculating pedestrian crash rates and therefore understanding which roadway and adjacent land use characteristics may produce the greatest risk at these crucial locations. This pilot project will be conducted in the City of Milwaukee, WI and will explore the following research questions: 1) What are the most effective methods to collect mid-block crossing counts? 2) What roadway, adjacent land use, and other contextual characteristics can be collected efficiently and included in a database of mid-block crossing counts? 3) What characteristics are associated with pedestrian mid-block crossing crash rates? Answering these questions will also help provide the foundation to eventually explore which roadway, adjacent land use, and other contextual characteristics are associated with mid-block pedestrian crossing volumes. This can lead to mid-block pedestrian crossing volume models and predictive models (safety performance functions) for mid-block pedestrian crossing crashes.