New Project: Roadside Feature Placement and Pedestrian Safety on Low and Intermediate Speed Roads

Guidelines for designing and placing roadside features have traditionally focused on automobile safety on higher-speed roads. Research has also shown feature placement can have safety benefits for pedestrians and bicyclists on lower-speed roads.

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MnDOT seeks a greater understanding of the relationships between pedestrian-involved crashes and diverse roadside characteristics, including sidewalks, roadside furnishing and configurations, operating speeds and surrounding land use. Identifying the effects of roadside features on driving speeds will also inform efforts to enhance design guidelines.

Data-driven and proactive guidance for roadside feature placement on low- and intermediate-speed roads will promote safety for road users of all travel modes, consistent with MnDOT goals for design guidelines.

“The research will help MnDOT understand how roadside features such as trees and signs may impact pedestrian and bicyclist safety,” said Hannah Pritchard, pedestrian and bicycle engineer, MnDOT Active Transportation Unit. “Results will help us understand the nuance of multimodal safety on low- and intermediate-speed roads.”

Objectives

In a new project, researchers will integrate crash data with diverse roadside characteristics to explore the safety relationship on low- and intermediate-speed roads. The results will provide safety benefits for road users of all modalities.

The objectives are:

Select sites with a range of operating speeds, surrounding land uses and roadside configurations to analyze
Collect and validate data from multiple sources to create a comprehensive database
Create a roadside safety analysis model to understand the safety impacts of roadside design elements
Develop concrete and quantitative guidelines for selecting roadside features based on safety impacts