Environmental characteristics around hotspots of pedestrian-automobile collision in the city of Austin

Abstract

The increasingly serious pedestrian safety issue in the City of Austin aroused the concern. Other than conducting quantitative analysis at aggregate level via collecting and examining the secondary data extracted from the existing datasets, the authors shifted towards the disaggregate level analysis, focusing on twenty-six hotspots of pedestrian collisions via mixed method research. Qualitative data was collected in the field survey to precisely capture the contextual features of collision locations, and was interpreted and coded as explanatory variables for the quantitative analysis. Instead of the frequency of pedestrian collision, crash rate measured by incident count per million pedestrians was the dependent variable to identify the factors truly influencing the pedestrian safety issue, not just the total number of walkers. The stepwise bivariate analysis and negative binomial regression examined the association between pedestrian collision rate and independent variables. Finally, the average block length, speed limit posted, sidewalk condition, and the degree of proximity to major pedestrian attractors were statistically significant factors correlating with the pedestrian collision risk.