Barriers to pedestrian-related road crash analysis in identifying engineering countermeasures

Abstract

Nonmotorized transportation is one of the trending transportation modes in a world where sustainable transportation is considered vitally important. They, being the most vulnerable road users in the road, people are not so much motivated to walk, mostly as short trips rather than for recreational walking. On average, 686 pedestrians are killed on roads in Sri Lanka per year. It is important if engineering countermeasures can be taken either to reduce the number of pedestrian crashes or to reduce the crash severity of the same. In order to do so, there needs to be sound evidence pointing at significant parameters in pedestrian crashes that can be addressed by engineering countermeasures. However, the Sri Lankan crash reporting system maintained by Sri Lanka Police has limited entries to carry out such a detailed study. Hence this paper has assessed the current crash reporting system and matched it with globally accepted minimum crash reporting criteria as well as frequently used pedestrian crash analyses around the world. The findings were limited to engineering parameters such as road geometry, the presence of road work zones, etc. Many details are not directly available, and a researcher is forced to collect data from secondary sources to map with the crash site. As a result, this paper has identified different data sources that can be used in pedestrian crash analysis other than the data directly from the Police database, and also identified missing but important data entries such as road alignment.