Q: In regards to a statement in a previous article about pedestrians crossing the street at unsafe locations, what is safe versus non-safe? I think a pedestrian crossing at any intersection is safe but some people think only marked crosswalks are safe.
A: The problem with the word ‘safe’ when talking about traffic is that it can misrepresent the risks, and lead us to believe that because we’ve chosen a ‘safe’ behavior a threat doesn’t exist. When people ask me about my job, my answer generally includes ‘traffic safety’. Maybe instead I should say that I work to make getting where you’re going less dangerous.
Let’s apply this way of thinking to crosswalks. It seems reasonable to assume that crossing the street at a marked crosswalk is safer (or less dangerous) than crossing at an intersection where there are no marked crosswalks. From a legal perspective, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians in both situations, but you’d think the paint on the pavement makes it more obvious to a driver where to expect a pedestrian.
In reality, more pedestrians are struck in marked crosswalks than unmarked crosswalks. In the city of Bellingham over the past five years 85 pedestrians have been struck in marked crosswalks while only 10 have been hit in unmarked crosswalks. Lest you think that this is some northwest Washington anomaly, other cities have experienced similar outcomes: A seven year study in San Diego found that nearly six pedestrian involved collisions occurred at marked crosswalks for every one incident at unmarked crosswalks.
Does that mean marked crosswalks are more dangerous than unmarked intersections? Not exactly. There is a reason that some crosswalks get paint and some don’t, and it’s primarily about volume. Cities tend to mark crosswalks in more urban areas where there is more pedestrian traffic. You’d expect that with more pedestrian traffic there would be more conflicts between cars and people, driving up the crashes compared to unmarked crosswalks. The people that did the study in San Diego thought that too, so they compensated for pedestrian traffic volume and found that marked crosswalks still had more crashes than unmarked crosswalks at a ratio of two to one.
Part of the problem may be our assumptions about the crosswalk itself. Does putting paint on a road make a pedestrian any safer? Here’s a clue: According to the Washington Department of Transportation, painted crosswalks are not safety devices, they are traffic control devices.
If crosswalks are not safety devices, what’s the point of painting them on the road? Traffic control devices help us understand the traffic systems we’ve all (theoretically) agreed upon so that we can travel harmoniously, each of us yielding or going, as appropriate. You could argue that traffic control devices are safety devices because when we all follow the traffic control devices we are safer on the roads. But here’s the thing – paint on a roadway can’t stop an inattentive driver from hitting a pedestrian. And it can’t protect an overconfident pedestrian from stepping in front of a car that’s too close to stop.
Pedestrian overconfidence is actually the generally accepted reason why there are more pedestrian involved crashes at marked crosswalks. This false sense of security leads pedestrians to be less cautious in marked crosswalks. They may believe that they are more easily seen by drivers when in a marked crosswalk (they’re not), or pay less attention to their surroundings (you’ve probably seen that person in a crosswalk with ear buds in and looking down at a phone).
In contrast, at unmarked crosswalks, pedestrians tend to recognize their vulnerability. A legitimate fear influences how people cross the street when there isn’t a painted crosswalk. It’s not that one intersection is inherently more dangerous than the other, but that humans behave differently in marked crosswalks than they do in unmarked crosswalks.
This isn’t just about pedestrian behavior. Sure, it’s not wise to ignore your surroundings when crossing the street. But the law requires drivers to yield to pedestrians in crosswalks, and given the mismatch between a car and a human, drivers bear a proportionate responsibility to avoid a collision.
I’ll wrap this up with some advice for pedestrians: A marked crosswalk is not a force field – it won’t protect you. It’s up to you to be cautious and alert. And some advice for drivers: Watch out for pedestrians that think a marked crosswalk is a force field.
Seems to me that an intersection built primarily for cars is a fundamentally unsafe place for pedestrians to cross. Crossing in the middle of a block, cars are generally just going straight. A pedestrian can look both ways and then immediately be aware of the entire situation on the street. If a pedestrian crosses blindly, drivers are relatively likely to be looking right at them when they do it.
At a large intersection, there are up four directions of traffic entering, each exiting in up to three different directions (N,S,E,W x straight,right,left). A pedestrian must cross half of those trajectories. Generally, at least one of them expects to have right of way. Visibility on some of them may be low. And, most importantly, the drivers attention is divided as they try to watch all the other potential collision trajectories from cars.
I think there are other important factors, like traffic volume (both car and pedestrian), visibility, pedestrian crossing distance, etc. But generally, for a lone pedestrian trying to cross a busy road that wasn’t well-designed for it, an opportunistic jog at the middle of the block seems safest.
Any research or articles that cover this perspective?
That’s an interesting perspective. If true, we’d have decades of pedestrian safety messaging to undo. I don’t know of any research, but I’m going to find out.
Yes, I agree. Intersections are the worst place across the street too many dangerous coming from too many directions best across in the middle of the road where things are only coming from to directions.