National Academies Press: OpenBook

Pedestrian Safety Relative to Traffic-Speed Management (2019)

Chapter: Appendix C - Semi-Structured Interview Script and Questionnaire

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Suggested Citation:"Appendix C - Semi-Structured Interview Script and Questionnaire." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Pedestrian Safety Relative to Traffic-Speed Management. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25618.
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Page 103
Page 104
Suggested Citation:"Appendix C - Semi-Structured Interview Script and Questionnaire." National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2019. Pedestrian Safety Relative to Traffic-Speed Management. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/25618.
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Page 104

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C-1 A P P E N D I X C Semi-Structured Interview Script and Questionnaire Thank you for agreeing to participate in this interview for the NCHRP Research Synthesis on Pedestrian Safety Relative to Traffic-Speed Management! As you know, there is great interest in this area throughout the profession. Your answers to the following questions will help us develop case example guidance for other communities looking to tackle this problem. This interview should take one hour and will be recorded so that we can more easily review the notes afterward. If at any point it would be helpful to refer us to agency or city documents for additional information, please do so. Information about Efforts, Partners, and Community or Institutional Reaction 1. Please tell me about any efforts—successful or unsuccessful—that your agency has made within the last two years to manage vehicle travel speed in order to improve pedestrian safety. These might include efforts related to engineering, education, enforcement, planning/evaluation, policy, or other. 2. What process or specific events led to the decision to address pedestrian safety via managing speed? 3. Did/do you have key partners for any of those efforts? If so, please describe their role(s). 4. Did you encounter/are you encountering any resistance to your agency’s efforts, either in the community or from other professionals? If so, how did you address/are you addressing the resistance? Metrics of Success 5. Which metrics have you used, if any, to measure the success of your efforts? 6. Have you found certain metrics to be more helpful than others? If so, please elaborate on which ones are more helpful and why. 7. Were any metrics unhelpful? If so, please elaborate on which ones were unhelpful and why.

C-2 Pedestrian Safety Relative to Traffic-Speed Management State DOTs and Guidance 10. Are there specific State, regional, or local policies that have supported your agency’s efforts to manage speed in order to improve pedestrian safety? If so, please briefly describe the policy and how it offered support. 11. Are there policies your State DOT could adopt or change to help your agency better manage speed to improve pedestrian safety? 12. (OPTIONAL, TIME-DEPENDENT) Is there specific guidance (e.g., from the MUTCD or the AASHTO Green Book) that has supported your agency’s efforts to manage speed in order to improve pedestrian safety? 13. (OPTIONAL, TIME-DEPENDENT) Conversely, is there specific guidance (e.g., from the MUTCD or the AASHTO Green Book) that has hampered your agency’s efforts to manage speed in order to improve pedestrian safety? How have you worked around these challenges? 14. Are there any resources your agency has published that would help us further understand your efforts? 15. Are there any other lessons learned that would be helpful for other agencies attempting to improve pedestrian safety via managing traffic speed, particularly regarding things that you would have done differently? 16. Finally, are there other professionals we should talk to better understand your agency’s efforts to address pedestrian safety through managing traffic speed? Thank you so much for your time! Your willingness to share your experiences will benefit countless communities across the country seeking to improve pedestrian safety via speed management. 8. Did your metrics indicate that certain efforts to manage speed have been more effective than others? If so, please elaborate on which efforts have been more effective and why. 9. Were any efforts unsuccessful? If so, please elaborate on which ones were unsuccessful and why.

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Measures that are effective at reducing speed, such as speed humps and mini traffic circles, are sometimes used in low-speed areas such as school zones. But they are often not recommended or allowed (via local policy) on the higher-speed streets typically associated with the highest injury severity for pedestrians.

For those higher-speed streets, redesigning them to communicate lower speed, such as through a roadway-reconfiguration effort, can effectively accomplish the goal of lowering speed. In the absence of street redesign, however, another effective current solution is enforcement, and particularly automated speed enforcement (ASE) that frees police to focus on other issues and that is free from implicit or explicit bias. It is important to carefully consider community context when selecting locations to employ ASE, to avoid disproportionately burdening any historically disadvantaged communities that surround the typically high-speed streets that need to be addressed.

The TRB National Cooperative Highway Research Program's NCHRP Synthesis 535: Pedestrian Safety Relative to Traffic-Speed Management aims to document what is known about strategies and countermeasures to address pedestrian safety via traffic-speed management in urban environments. For example, the City of San Francisco regularly uses curb extensions as traffic-calming devices on its streets. However, the political and land use context of each city heavily influences the types of treatments that are considered feasible for each city. Thus, the City of Los Angeles has had to find alternatives to both ASE and road diets, the latter of which have been the subject of intense public backlash in some cases.

These realities—that speed management can be fraught with difficulty—have spurred creative thinking about how to work within contextual confines, resulting in some particularly noteworthy and promising practices. For example, the City of Nashville anticipated potential backlash against speed-management efforts and thus chose to work with advocacy groups to identify areas of the city desiring walkability improvements. By installing walkability improvements in those areas first, city leaders created instant wins that could be used as leverage for future projects.

The authors of the synthesis found there may be a need for greater clarity about the speed-limit-setting process, as well as for greater collaboration between local and state agencies when state roads run through urban areas. In particular, it may be worth exploring whether there is a need for a framework that will foster collaboration between local and state staff on safety initiatives such as achieving flexibility in roadway design, changing laws or regulations that govern speed-limit setting, and finding a balance between local safety needs and regional mobility needs. Such a framework may support both local and state agencies attempting to address safety issues and reach larger goals as articulated through movements like Vision Zero.

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