NYMTC Regional Pedestrian Safety Study - New York Metropolitan ...

discussion of opportunities and obstacles, and identification of local issues and proposed
solutions. Following each workshop, a "pedestrian audit" or walking field trip is conducted to
show how the solutions can be applied. The participants make up a cross-section of their
communities and typically include local government representatives, local businesses, nonprofit
organizations with interests in the pedestrian and bicycling communities, and local residents.
Safe Routes to School workshops are typically half a day long and focus on improving children’s
commute to school. Safe Routes to School programs motivate children to walk or bike to school,
encouraging an active and healthy lifestyle. At the same time, Safe Routes to School programs
facilitate the planning, development, and implementation of measures to increase the safety of
child walkers or bikers. The impact of these programs stretches far beyond the one-day kickoff
as communities operate their own Safe Routes to School programs and develop their own
initiatives for making their communities healthier and more pleasant places to live.
Designing Streets for Pedestrian Safety is one option of FHWA’s Pedestrian Safety Action Plan
Project which produced a “How-to-Guide” that explains the steps that an agency needs to take to
reduce pedestrian crashes. This training can help the agency develop a safety action plan that
will change the way the agency approaches pedestrian safety, or train their engineers and
designers to provide pedestrian safety in their roadway design, or both. Instructors spend two
days teaching attendees roadway designs that affect pedestrian safety, and cover effective
countermeasures in great detail. The second day also includes a site visit to a problematic
location where the participants suggest candidate countermeasures. Relevant crash data, traffic
data and other relevant information on the pre-selected locations, as well as condition and
collision diagrams, are utilized for the field exercise. A policy change exercise is also conducted
as part of the workshop.
The Designing Streets for Pedestrian Safety workshop has led to changes in the way pedestrian
facilities are designed and are included in projects already, as the following comment from a
workshop participant indicates.
The pedestrian safety workshop was very useful for our county road improvement projects.
Pedestrian activity is increasing, and the need for sidewalks is being considered along several of
our projects that are now in the design stage. On one project, we needed to evaluate whether
occasional pedestrians could be accommodated with a shoulder or provide a sidewalk. The
decision was made to provide a sidewalk instead of a 5' shoulder. The sidewalk will terminate at
a proposed roundabout at the north end of the project, and the training material will be helpful in
designing the sidewalk.
The Road Safety Audit workshop is similar to the two-day workshop described in the previous
paragraph except it does not focus exclusively on pedestrians. The workshop starts with one-day
in-house instruction followed by a second-day site visit that uses the relevant data and
supplemental information to analyze a pre-selected problematic location. This course stresses
the value of building a multi-disciplinary team to conduct the audit, including traffic engineers,
planners, local community groups, and law enforcement officials. The inclusion of different
disciplines ensures that solutions will be drawn from a wider range of approaches and will reflect
community values and context sensitivity beyond traffic engineering. Also the audit emphasizes
NYMTC Pedestrian Safety Study 20