Identification of high risk pedestrian locations

In order to identify appropriate countermeasures to improve pedestrian safety, it is necessary to identify those locations which pose high risks. The objective of this thesis is to develop criteria to identify high risk locations for pedestrian safety on roadway networks. These high risk locations were identified based on analyses of crash data. The crash locations were ranked based on several factors such as crash severity, age group, characteristics of pedestrians involved in crashes, and indicators of traffic and pedestrian exposure. Criteria were developed such that different weights were given for age groups of pedestrians involved in the crashes, and for traffic volume. These developed criteria are to assist transportation system managers to better understand the causes of crashes and to identify appropriate design and operating strategies to enhance pedestrian safety. Crash data from Clark County, Nevada, were used to develop and to validate the proposed methods to identify high risk pedestrian locations. The results showed that the top 10 high risk locations remained almost the same irrespective of the method used to rank the locations, which is indicative of the robustness of the methods