1 Using GIS to Identify Unsafe Bus-stops

Enhancing bus transit system performance and increasing its market potential has significant impact on congestion and air quality in urban areas. Such derived benefits can be maximized by providing safe and improved access to buses at bus-stops. However, buses typically stop at locations farther away from an intersection. These locations do not have adequate facilities such as crosswalks to cross the streets. Riders or users, thus, tend to cross the streets midblock from either behind or in front of the buses. These unsafe maneuvers result in pedestrian crashes and pedestrian-vehicle conflicts. The focus of this paper is to develop a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based methodology to identify and rank bus-stops in pedestrian high crash concentration areas. The GIS based methodology involves (1) geocoding pedestrian crash data, (2) identifying pedestrian crash concentrations by generating a crash concentration map, (3) overlaying this on a bus-stop coverage to identify pedestrian high crash locations in the vicinity of bus-stops, (4) extracting the number of crashes for each bus-stop location in pedestrian high crash concentration areas, and (5) ranking the high crash bus-stop locations. The causes of pedestrian crashes at these bus-stop locations then need to be studied to identify strategies to enhance safety at such locations. The working of the GIS based methodology is illustrated using 2002 pedestrian crash data, bus-stop coverage, and street centerline coverage for the Las Vegas metropolitan area