SFMTA Pedestrian Improvements Toolkit Design Factors and the Effects on an Aging Population
Author: Kemper Matz
Faculty Supervisor: Yiyi Wang
Department: Engineering
The importance of pedestrian safety at intersections cannot be overstated. Creating a safe environment for pedestrians to cross a street is important in designing intersections. SFMTA has created a “Pedestrian Improvements Toolbox” of design features that can be implemented to potentially reduce vehicle pedestrian collisions at intersections. Of the nine features that are in the toolkit including, continental crosswalks, pedestrian islands/refuge, and the pedestrian scramble we decided to focus on advanced limit lines as the feature to be analyzed. This feature was chosen based on its ease of implementation and cost, as well as the available data on the installation date and location of the design features. It was also important for there to be sufficient vehicle-pedestrian accident data before and after the date of installation as we would use this to calculate the crash modification factor (CMF) and compare this to the national value from ClearingHouse and between elderly (65+) and young (14-64) pedestrians. Through the analysis we can find the actual CMF value for advanced limit lines within San Francisco and if they are more effective within different age demographics.