The Continuing Debate about Safety in Numbers—Data from Oakland, CA

Judy Geyer, Noah Raford, David Ragland and Trinh Pham

Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley

Abstract: The primary objective of this paper is to review the appropriate use of ratio variables in the study of pedestrian injury exposure. We provide a discussion that rejects the assumption that the relationship between a random variable (e.g., a population X) and a ratio (e.g., injury or disease per population Y/X) is necessarily negative. In the study of pedestrian risk, the null hypothesis is that pedestrian injury risk is constant with respect to pedestrian volume. This study employs a unique data set containing the number of pedestrian collisions, average annual pedestrian volume, average annual vehicle volume, and physical intersection characteristics for 247 intersections in Oakland, California. We use a GLM to estimate the expected injury risk given average annual pedestrian volume and other explanatory variables. Consistent with studies by Leden, Ekman and Jacobsen, the null hypothesis is rejected. Indeed, the risk of collision for pedestrians decreases with increasing pedestrian flows, and it increases with increasing vehicle flows. We also find that pedestrians are more likely to be struck by motorists in commercial and mixed areas than in residential areas.

Keywords: Engineering; safeTREC (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006-04-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/5498x882.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cdl:itsrrp:qt5498x882

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings from Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Lisa Schiff ().