New Planning Tools for Safer Roads for Bikes and Pedestrians

By Charles Pekow
A few new tools can help communities make the roads safer for cyclists and pedestrians, direct from Washington, DC.
The Guidebook on Identification of High Pedestrian Crash Locations (https://tinyurl.com/ydarfsak), a manual for traffic planners from the Federal Highway Administration includes tips for improving bicyclist safety, acknowledging that agencies need to take a different approach to improving bike/ped safety than they do for motorist safety and that since most crashes involve motorists, they may focus their attention on them and give leg-powered transit short shrift. Cyclist crashes also get underreported, lessening awareness of them.
The tome refers readers to a variety of tools that can help determine safety needs. But it says we still don’t know some basic necessities, such as the relationships between the number of cyclists crossing an intersection or on a road to the number of incidents.
Meanwhile, the Transportation Research Board in October 2018 released the 2017 FARS/CRSS Pedestrian Bicyclist Crash Typing Manual A Guide for Coders Using the FARS/CRSS Ped/Bike Typing Tool, with the initials standing for Fatality Analysis Reporting System and Crash Report Sampling System (https://tinyurl.com/ya3wdh88).
The manual revises factors to consider when coding incidents (presence of crosswalk, school zone,, traffic light…) and factors such as whether a motorist or cyclist lost control of the vehicle.