Microscale pedestrian environment surrounding pedestrian injury sites in Washington state, 2015–2020

Abstract

Objective

While microscale pedestrian environment features such as sidewalks and crosswalks can affect pedestrian safety, it is challenging to assess microscale environment associated risk across locations or at scale. Addressing these challenges requires an efficient auditing protocol that can be used to assess frequencies of microscale environment features. For this reason, we developed an eight-item pedestrian environment virtual audit protocol and conducted a descriptive epidemiologic study of pedestrian injury in Washington State, USA.

Methods

We used data from police reports at pedestrian-automotive collision sites where the pedestrian was seriously injured or died. At each collision site, high school students participating in an online summer internship program virtually audited Google Street View imagery to assess the presence of microscale pedestrian environment features such as crosswalks and streetlighting. We assessed inter-rater reliability using Cohen’s kappa and explored prevalence of eight microscale environment features in relation to injury severity and municipal boundaries.

Results

There were 2248 motor vehicle crashes eliciting police response and resulting in death or serious injury of a pedestrian in Washington State between January 1, 2015 and May 8, 2020. Of the crashes resulting in serious injury or death, 498 (22%) resulted in fatalities and 1840 (82%) occurred within municipal boundaries. Cohen’s kappa scores for the eight pedestrian features that were audited ranged from 0.52 to 0.86. Audit results confirmed that features such as sidewalks and crosswalks were more common at collision sites within city limits.

Conclusions

High school student volunteers with minimal training can reliably audit microscale pedestrian environments using limited resources.

Keywords:

• CANVAS
• Google street view
• motor vehicle collision
• pedestrian injury
• Washington state
• pedestrian safety

Acknowledgments

We thank PEMCO Insurance company for providing financial support to the INSIGHT High School program, the internship program that this study leveraged. We also thank all the high school students involved in the INSIGHT summer internship program as well as Barb Chamberlain and Charlotte Claybrooke at the Washington State Department of Transportation.

Author’s contributions

JTS contributed through data acquisition, data analysis, data interpretation, and drafting the manuscript. AM contributed by conception of the study and through data acquisition. CVU contributed by conception of the study and through data acquisition. MN contributed by conception of the study and through data acquisition. IB contributed by conception of the study, through data acquisition and substantive revisions to the manuscript. SP contributed through data acquisition and substantive revisions to the manuscript. MDV contributed by conception of the study. SJM contributed by conception of study, data acquisition, data analysis, data interpretation, and substantive revisions to the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data availability statement

The police report dataset analyzed during the current study is available in the Washington State Department of Transportation repository, https://wsdot.wa.gov/. The audit datasets generated and analyzed during this study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Additional information

Funding

The High School INSIGHT program was supported by a generous gift from PEMCO Insurance. The CANVAS tool is supported by a grant from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (P2CHD058486), awarded to the Columbia Population Research Center.