Identifying Research Priorities to Improve Safety for Pedestrians and Bicyclists Accessing Bus Stops

Project Description

Most riders access transit service by foot or bike, which makes transit stops important generators of pedestrian and bicycle activity. However, studying the relationship between transit access and ped/bike safety can be challenging for numerous reasons, particularly a lack of safety-related datasets that specifically identify pedestrians or bicyclists as also being transit passengers on the first or last mile of their trip. This has led to limited prior research specifically focusing on the safety of pedestrians and bicyclists as they access transit stops. In light of this gap, there are two overarching objectives for this project. The first is to lay the groundwork for future transit-related ped/bike safety research through the Center for Pedestrian Bicyclist Safety (CPBS) over the next five years to help support the US DOT Strategic Goal of “increasing transit ridership in top transit cities.” To accomplish this, a three-step method is proposed: (1) conduct an in-depth literature review on pedestrian/bicycle safety issues when accessing transit; (2) identify local, state, and national transit-related datasets that can be used to analyze ped/bike safety; and (3) analyze nationwide trends in bus-stop related pedestrian fatalities using Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) data. The second objective is to address transit access by pedestrians as part of one of the core Year 1 CPBS Research Themes to demonstrate integrating transit into ped/bike safety research. Specifically, this project will integrate with the “Arterials” Research Theme and conduct an exploratory analysis of the correlation between bus ridership and pedestrian safety outcomes on arterials in Tennessee (see related project 23UTK02).