Evaluation of Pedestrian Safety: Geographical Identification of Pedestrian Crash Hotsl pots and Evaluating Risk Factors for Injury Severity

摘要

Pedestrian-involved crashes that occurred in the city of San Francisco over six years from 2002–2007were analyzed to evaluate two key aspects of pedestrian safety: occurrence and severity. This was done toidentify locations with frequent occurrences of pedestrian-involved crashes and to examine various riskfactors on the injury severity of pedestrian-involved crashes. A Geographical Information System (GIS)analysis used for the former shows that the frequency of pedestrian crashes is higher in the vicinity of thecentral business district, while the rate is higher in the periphery of the city. The latter specifies anordered probit model to evaluate risk factors that increase the probability of severe injury and fatality.Those factors were: i) age (<15 and 65+), alcohol consumption and cell-phone use among pedestriancharacteristics; ii) nighttime, weekends and rainy weather among environmental characteristics; and iii)influence of alcohol, larger vehicles (pickup, bus and truck) and vehicle proceeding straight in striking apedestrian among crash characteristics. The methods discussed in this paper are readily applicable toevaluation of safety performance in other regions where pedestrian crash data are available.