National Strategies
for Advancing Child Pedestrian Safety
Goals
To
enhance the well-being and safety of children by:
- Reducing
their risk of injury while walking
- Increasing
their physical activity level
- Creating
a more pedestrian-friendly environment
Strategies
1
- Enhance
public awareness about the need to improve safety for child
pedestrians while promoting the health and environmental benefits of
walking.
Create coordinated national, state, and local
public information campaigns that increase public awareness and
understanding of:
1.
The interdependent relationship among personal health,
safety, community livability, and environmental protection;
2.
Pedestrians as road users who, like motorists and
bicyclists, need to be safe in traffic;
3.
The manner and degree to which engineering solutions
can enhance pedestrian safety (e.g., traffic calming, separation of
pedestrians from motor vehicle traffic, and better crosswalk
controls);
4.
The usefulness and cost-effectiveness of traffic law
enforcement.
2
- Modify
the behavior and attitudes of both pedestrians and drivers to improve
sharing the road.
1.
Develop and encourage strategies that improve sharing
the road, and increase mutual respect of pedestrians and motorists by
teaching both groups the rules of the road.
2.
Help the public understand the degree to which
excessive speed increases stopping distances and thus increases the
risk of pedestrian death.
3.
Encourage the public to support enforcement of posted
speed limits (especially in school zones and residential areas), laws
that prohibit passing of school buses, and yield-to-pedestrian laws.
Support the development and use of innovative technologies, such as
red light cameras to help enforce traffic laws.
4.
Develop, evaluate, and disseminate programs to educate
parents and drivers about children's abilities and limitations as
pedestrians in traffic. These programs should take into account
different parenting styles and abilities. Encourage parents to
supervise their children in traffic and to teach their children
age-appropriate pedestrian safety rules.
3
- Modify
the physical environment to better support pedestrian traffic.
1. At the national level:
a. Establish
transportation policies that encourage local communities to integrate
pedestrian access and safety into every phase of transportation
planning.
b. Foster
collaboration among federal agencies and national professional groups
to help develop and promote public policy
that
leverages resources to achieve the most effective programs without
duplicating efforts.
c. Develop road
construction standards that are more conducive to safe walking.
d. Compile and
disseminate local "best practices" that foster pedestrian
safety, especially those that emphasize the use of low-cost solutions
and new technologies.
e. Help teach
traffic engineers and engineering students how to retrofit streets and
roads to make them safer. Develop
and
disseminate curricula, sponsor professional conferences, and assist
with continuing education.
2. At the state
and local levels:
a. Encourage
state and local officials to revise laws, ordinances, and practices to
promote the construction of sidewalks and
traffic-calming measures, such as roundabouts, speed humps and
other road designs.
b. Encourage city planners, engineers, real estate developers,
and landscape architects to consider pedestrian safety--particularly
for children and persons with disabilities--when designing new
communities or modifying existing ones.
c. Encourage
local officials, designers, and planners to enhance pedestrian
accessibility and safety when building or remodeling schools,
recreational sites, and businesses.
4
- Develop
and conduct effective safe-walking programs.
1. Ensure that programs to
prevent child pedestrian injuries receive public and private support
sufficient to provide programs in
all states. This may require corporate and Congressional champions and
a national spokesperson.
2. Encourage federal agencies
responsible for road safety to make available effective pedestrian
safety training activities for children.
Encourage federal, state, and local departments of education to
establish safe routes to school.
3. Encourage states to develop
pedestrian safety plans that reflect community needs. Encourage each
state department of transportation to establish and adequately staff a
pedestrian safety office to coordinate and conduct training programs,
conduct public information and education campaigns, and develop
local programs through- out the state.
4. At the community level,
create multidisciplinary coalitions to develop programs that emphasize
safety aspects and the health and
environmental benefits of walking. Encourage parents, teachers, school
administrators, pediatricians, and other child care
providers to identify and creatively solve local pedestrian
safety problems. Such coalitions should seek to enroll nontraditional
partners.
5
1. Evaluate existing childhood pedestrian
safety programs by using a systematic review process to determine
which ones are effective and
deserve widespread replication. Such programs include:
a. Educational
programs, such as Safe Routes to School, Walking School Bus, Willie
Whistle, Keep on Looking, and others designed
to reduce dart-outs and help children cross streets safely.
b.
Traffic-calming strategies, such as roundabouts, speed humps, and
other measures.
c. Enforcement
strategies, such as red light cameras and stricter ticketing of
drivers who illegally pass school buses.
2. Where
sufficient data do not exist, use randomized controlled trials where
feasible to measure intervention effectiveness.
3. Conduct research to determine the
cost-effectiveness of promising programs.
4. Fund research that links pedestrian
safety to physical activity and a healthier environment.
5. Identify behavioral indicators to help
determine when a child is ready to cross the street independently.
Assess the chronologic
and developmental age, skill patterns, and teachable moments when
children are most receptive to interventions.
6. Determine what level of supervision
children need at various stages of cognitive, social, skill, and
behavioral development.
Establish appropriate standards for such supervision.
7. Develop, test, and evaluate programs
that use teens to mentor young children in pedestrian safety.
6 - Conduct
surveillance to measure children's pedestrian injury rates, quantify
the amount of walking children normally do, and identify risk factors
for injury.
1. Identify and validate useful indirect
measures that predict the occurrence of a child pedestrian injury. Use
these to monitor
program effectiveness.
2. Develop and test indicators of the
prevalence of walking for transportation, the public's beliefs about
the benefits and risks of walking, and the existence of environ-
mental and social risks of walking.
3. Define children's exposure to risk of
pedestrian injury that includes, but is not limited to, factors
related to the time the child spends
in the street; traffic density, speed, and complexity; and road
features such as the number of lanes and existence of
marked or signed crosswalks. Develop and implement methods of
collecting data on such exposure.
4. Develop local risk factor surveillance
systems to monitor how and why child pedestrians are injured, and to
identify the environmental and behavioral modifications that could
have prevented such injuries. Establish linkages to other data
sources, particularly
emergency department data and police crash reports.
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