14-05 Development of Decision Support Tools to Assess Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety: Development of Safety Performance Functions

While a number of studies have developed Safety Performance Functions (SPFs) for motorized traffic, there has been a very limited focus on developing SPFs for non-motorized traffic. Lack of exposure measures for pedestrians and bicyclists has been cited often as the obstacle to developing reliable SPFs. This project aimed at developing statewide SPFs for bicyclists and pedestrians at urban intersections. The SPFs developed can be used as a decision supporting tool for planners and practitioners in prioritizing areas for safety improvements. In order to capture crash patterns despite, a carefully designed sampling approach was implemented and improvements on other aspects of modeling were made. Specifically, we implemented structural equation modeling in the efforts to establish proxy measures of non-motorized exposures. SPFs for pedestrians and bicyclists at urban intersections, are recommended