The article is authored by Mooney et al., (2016) for demonstrating an approach based on environmental technology for assessing characteristics of intersection and streets that are associated with injuries. The study was conducted after a 2013 annual report that an estimated 70, 000 pedestrians lost their lives or sustained motor vehicle injuries in America. As compared to the last decade, the overall traffic fatalities have increased by 3% nationally, with New York having registered the highest pedestrian’s death annually since 1910. The fact that a pedestrian is 50% likely to get killed by a vehicle as compared to vehicle occupant makes pedestrian safety a public health concern. This explains the reasons why New York is among the major city that has invested in pedestrians safety infrastructure for improving the population health, with 1500 pedestrian signals and numerous roads and signals reengineered.
The approach is cheaper and time-saving as compared to pedestrian injury location-based studies. The researcher employed imagery taken by Google Street View from 2007-2011 for assessing the nine characteristics found in New York City’s 532 intersections. The estimated pedestrian count was controlled, and the relation between the characteristics of the intersections was estimated together with the damaging collisions frequency. The conclusion of the study was that together with pedestrian count model, use of Google Street View imagery an informative methodology that is viable in identification of characteristics of the pedestrian characteristics which have an association with the high pedestrian injury counts. It was revealed that lower pedestrian counts injuries were registered at the intersections that harbored higher volumes of pedestrians. This was in consistence with in-person studies. Further, the statistical analyses were generated using a combination of Cohen K for assessing reliability, computed kappas and Spearman correlation between Walk Score values and modeled pedestrian count.
Delegate your assignment to our experts and they will do the rest.
It is conclusive to argue that information technology is more effective in assessing the risks factors associated with pedestrian injury as compared to site visits. The author has supported his central argument by use of Kappa scores whereby the five year study period revealed that a total of 1117 collisions took place and all involved injury of a passenger in all the 532 intersections that were audited. The right-skewed distribution of collision revealed that 45.3% of the 241 intersections did not report any fatalities or pedestrian injuries when the intersection with the highest fatalities and injuries had 36. Another key finding is that pedestrian injury counts were higher in bus stops, visible bill boards, and pedestrian signals. The information technology-based approach obviates the time consumed and the expenses incurred when visiting the crash sites for collection of physical environment data, therefore, limiting the number of intersection samples that researchers use for study.
This study is therefore of great importance to the municipal government which may be considering implementing crosswalks at intersections with an elevated baseline risk to learn that the crosswalk locations are associated with high counts of elevated injury. This is even though crosswalks reduce the risk of a pedestrian who is crossing the streets. Drivers are also believed to experience distractions on the road owing to roadside advertising, rendering bus stops, billboards as areas with a higher risk of injury make road engineering responsible for the elevated risk. In conclusion, further research is vital for complimenting logistical efficiency so that location studies that are virtually located can have better and efficient sampling strategies for assessing features that are traffic calming relating to injury risk entirely.
