Pedestrian safety at signalized intersections: Modelling spatial effects of exposure, geometry and signalization on a large urban network.

Intersections represent the most dangerous sites in the road network for pedestrians: not only is modal separation often impossible, but elements of geometry, traffic control, and built environment further exacerbate crash risk. Evaluating the safety impact of intersection features requires methods to quantify relationships between different factors and pedestrian injuries. The purpose of this paper is to model the effects of exposure, geometry, and signalization on pedestrian injuries at urban signalized intersections using a Full Bayes spatial Poisson Log-Normal model that accounts for unobserved heterogeneity and spatial correlation. Using the Integrated Nested Laplace Approximation (INLA) technique, this work leverages a rich database of geometric and signalization variables for 1864 intersections in Montreal, Quebec. To collect exposure data, short-term pedestrian and vehicle counts were extrapolated to AADT using developed expansion factors. Results of the model confirmed the positive relationship between pedestrian and vehicle volumes and pedestrian injuries. Curb extensions, raised medians, and exclusive left turn lanes were all found to reduce pedestrian injuries, while the total number of lanes and the number of commercial entrances were found to increase them. Pedestrian priority phases reduced injuries while the green straight arrow increased injuries. Lastly, the posterior expected number of crashes was used to identify hotspots. The proposed ranking criteria identified many intersections close to the city centre where the expected number of crashes is highest and intersections along arterials with lower pedestrian volumes where individual pedestrian risk is elevated. Understanding the effects of intersection geometry and pedestrian signalization will aid in ensuring the safety of pedestrians at signalized intersections.

Traveling by Bus Instead of Car on Urban Major Roads: Safety Benefits for Vehicle Occupants, Pedestrians, and Cyclists.

Some studies have estimated fatality and injury rates for bus occupants, but data was aggregated at the country level and made no distinction between bus types. Also, injured pedestrians and cyclists, as a result of bus travel, were overlooked. We compared injury rates for car and city bus occupants on specific urban major roads, as well as the cyclist and pedestrian injuries associated with car and bus travel. We selected ten bus routes along major urban arterials (in Montreal, Canada). Passenger-kilometers traveled were estimated from vehicle counts at intersections (2002-2010) and from bus passenger counts (2008). Police accident reports (2001-2010) provided injury data for all modes. Injury rates associated with car and bus travel were calculated for vehicle occupants, pedestrians, and cyclists. Injury rate ratios were also computed. The safety benefits of bus travel, defined as the number of vehicle occupant, cyclist, and pedestrian injuries saved, were estimated for each route. Overall, for all ten routes, the ratio between car and bus occupant injury rates is 3.7 (95% CI [3.4, 4.0]). The rates of pedestrian and cyclist injuries per hundred million passenger-kilometers are also significantly greater for car travel than that for bus travel: 4.1 (95% CI [3.5, 4.9]) times greater for pedestrian injuries; 5.3 (95% CI [3.8, 7.6]) times greater for cyclist injuries. Similar results were observed for fatally and severely injured vehicle occupants, cyclists, and pedestrians. At the route level, the safety benefits of bus travel increase with the difference in injury rate associated with car and bus travel but also with the amount of passenger-kilometers by bus. Results show that city bus is a safer mode than car, for vehicle occupants but also for cyclists and pedestrians traveling along these bus routes. The safety benefits of bus travel greatly vary across urban routes; this spatial variation is most likely linked to environmental factors. Understanding the safety benefits of public transit for specific transport routes is likely to provide valuable information for mobilizing city and transportation planners.

Cyclist deceleration rate as surrogate safety measure in Montreal using smartphone GPS data.

Urban areas in North American cities with positive trends in bicycle usage also witness a high number of cyclist injuries every year. Previous cyclist safety studies based on the traditional approach, which relies on historical crash data, are known to have some limitations such as the fact that crashes need to happen (a reactive approach). This paper explores the use of GPS deceleration events as a surrogate-proactive measure and investigates the relationship between reported cyclist road injuries and deceleration events. The surrogate safety measure is defined based on deceleration values representing hard breaking situations. This work uses a large sample of GPS cyclist trip data from a smartphone application to extract deceleration rates at intersections and along segments and to explore its relationship with the number of observed injuries and validate deceleration rate (DR) as a surrogate safety measure. Using Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, we compared the ranking of sites based on the expected number of injuries and based on DR. The ranks of expected injuries and dangerous decelerations were found to have a correlation of 0.60 at signalized intersections, 0.53 at non-signalized intersections and 0.57 at segments. Despite the promising results of this study, more granular data and validation work needs to be done to improve the reliability of the measures. The technological limitations and future work are discussed at the end of the paper.

Are signalized intersections with cycle tracks safer? A case-control study based on automated surrogate safety analysis using video data.

Cities in North America have been building bicycle infrastructure, in particular cycle tracks, with the intention of promoting urban cycling and improving cyclist safety. These facilities have been built and expanded but very little research has been done to investigate the safety impacts of cycle tracks, in particular at intersections, where cyclists interact with turning motor-vehicles. Some safety research has looked at injury data and most have reached the conclusion that cycle tracks have positive effects of cyclist safety. The objective of this work is to investigate the safety effects of cycle tracks at signalized intersections using a case-control study. For this purpose, a video-based method is proposed for analyzing the post-encroachment time as a surrogate measure of the severity of the interactions between cyclists and turning vehicles travelling in the same direction. Using the city of Montreal as the case study, a sample of intersections with and without cycle tracks on the right and left sides of the road were carefully selected accounting for intersection geometry and traffic volumes. More than 90h of video were collected from 23 intersections and processed to obtain cyclist and motor-vehicle trajectories and interactions. After cyclist and motor-vehicle interactions were defined, ordered logit models with random effects were developed to evaluate the safety effects of cycle tracks at intersections. Based on the extracted data from the recorded videos, it was found that intersection approaches with cycle tracks on the right are safer than intersection approaches with no cycle track. However, intersections with cycle tracks on the left compared to no cycle tracks seem to be significantly safer. Results also identify that the likelihood of a cyclist being involved in a dangerous interaction increases with increasing turning vehicle flow and decreases as the size of the cyclist group arriving at the intersection increases. The results highlight the important role of cycle tracks and the factors that increase or decrease cyclist safety. Results need however to be confirmed using longer periods of video data.

Mapping cyclist activity and injury risk in a network combining smartphone GPS data and bicycle counts.

In recent years, the modal share of cycling has been growing in North American cities. With the increase of cycling, the need of bicycle infrastructure and road safety concerns have also raised. Bicycle flows are an essential component in safety analysis. The main objective of this work is to propose a methodology to estimate and map bicycle volumes and cyclist injury risk throughout the entire network of road segments and intersections on the island of Montreal, achieved by combining smartphone GPS traces and count data. In recent years, methods have been proposed to estimate average annual daily bicycle (AADB) volume and injury risk estimates at both the intersection and segment levels using bicycle counts. However, these works have been limited to small samples of locations for which count data is available. In this work, a methodology is proposed to combine short- and long-term bicycle counts with GPS data to estimate AADB volumes along segments and intersections in the entire network. As part of the validation process, correlation is observed between AADB values obtained from GPS data and AADB values from count data, with R-squared values of 0.7 for signalized intersections, 0.58 for non-signalized intersections and between 0.48 and 0.76 for segments with and without bicycle infrastructure. The methodology is also validated through the calibration of safety performance functions using both sources of AADB estimates, from counts and from GPS data. Using the validated AADB estimates, the factors associated with injury risk were identified using data from the entire population of intersections and segments throughout Montreal. Bayesian injury risk maps are then generated and the concentrations of expected injuries and risk at signalized intersections are identified. Signalized intersections, which are often located at the intersection of major arterials, witness 4 times more injuries and 2.5 times greater risk than non-signalized intersections. A similar observation can be made for arterials which not only have a higher concentration of injuries but also injury rates (risk). On average, streets with cycle tracks have a greater concentration of injuries due to greater bicycle volumes, however, and in accordance with recent works, the individual risk per cyclist is lower, justifying the benefits of cycle tracks.

Multimodal injury risk analysis of road users at signalized and non-signalized intersections.

This paper proposes a multimodal approach to study safety at intersections by simultaneously analysing the safety and flow outcomes for both motorized and non-motorized traffic. This study uses an extensive inventory of signalized and non-signalized intersections on the island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, containing disaggregate motor-vehicle, cyclist and pedestrian flows, injury data, geometric design, traffic control and built environment characteristics in the vicinity of each intersection. Bayesian multivariate Poisson models are used to analyze the injury and traffic flow outcomes and to develop safety performance functions for each mode at both facilities. After model calibration, contributing injury frequency factors are identified. Injury frequency and injury risk measures are then generated to carry out a comparative study to identify which mode is at greatest risk at intersections in Montreal. Among other results, this study identified the significant effect that motor-vehicle traffic imposes on cyclist and pedestrian injury occurrence. Motor-vehicle traffic is the main risk determinant for all injury and intersection types. This highlights the need for safety improvements for cyclists and pedestrians who are, on average, at 14 and12 times greater risk than motorists, respectively, at signalized intersections. Aside from exposure measures, this work also identifies some geometric design and built environment characteristics affecting injury occurrence for cyclists, pedestrians and motor-vehicle occupants.

Cyclist activity and injury risk analysis at signalized intersections: a Bayesian modelling approach.

This study proposes a two-equation Bayesian modelling approach to simultaneously study cyclist injury occurrence and bicycle activity at signalized intersections as joint outcomes. This approach deals with the potential presence of endogeneity and unobserved heterogeneities and is used to identify factors associated with both cyclist injuries and volumes. Its application to identify high-risk corridors is also illustrated. Montreal, Quebec, Canada is the application environment, using an extensive inventory of a large sample of signalized intersections containing disaggregate motor-vehicle traffic volumes and bicycle flows, geometric design, traffic control and built environment characteristics in the vicinity of the intersections. Cyclist injury data for the period of 2003-2008 is used in this study. Also, manual bicycle counts were standardized using temporal and weather adjustment factors to obtain average annual daily volumes. Results confirm and quantify the effects of both bicycle and motor-vehicle flows on cyclist injury occurrence. Accordingly, more cyclists at an intersection translate into more cyclist injuries but lower injury rates due to the non-linear association between bicycle volume and injury occurrence. Furthermore, the results emphasize the importance of turning motor-vehicle movements. The presence of bus stops and total crosswalk length increase cyclist injury occurrence whereas the presence of a raised median has the opposite effect. Bicycle activity through intersections was found to increase as employment, number of metro stations, land use mix, area of commercial land use type, length of bicycle facilities and the presence of schools within 50-800 m of the intersection increase. Intersections with three approaches are expected to have fewer cyclists than those with four. Using Bayesian analysis, expected injury frequency and injury rates were estimated for each intersection and used to rank corridors. Corridors with high bicycle volumes, located mainly in the central neighbourhoods of Montreal, have lower risk of injury. These results may reflect the "safety in numbers" hypothesis or cyclist preference towards safer intersections and corridors. Despite these corridors having a lower individual risk, they are nevertheless associated with a greater number of injuries.