1. Stop versus yield on pedestrian-involved fatal crashes in the United States
- Author
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Cheryl W. Lynn, Young-Jun Kweon, and S. Emily Hartman
- Subjects
Washington ,Automobile Driving ,Engineering ,Georgia ,Time Factors ,Databases, Factual ,Minnesota ,Statistics as Topic ,Poison control ,Human Factors and Ergonomics ,Crash ,Walking ,Pedestrian ,Suicide prevention ,Occupational safety and health ,Transport engineering ,Oregon ,Environmental health ,Injury prevention ,Humans ,Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality ,Analysis of Variance ,Maryland ,business.industry ,musculoskeletal, neural, and ocular physiology ,Accidents, Traffic ,Public Health, Environmental and Occupational Health ,Fatality Analysis Reporting System ,Human factors and ergonomics ,Nebraska ,social sciences ,United States ,Cross-Sectional Studies ,Regression Analysis ,population characteristics ,sense organs ,Safety ,business ,Automobiles ,human activities - Abstract
In an effort to improve pedestrian safety, several states in the United States changed their pedestrian laws by changing the requirement that drivers yield to pedestrians in crosswalks to a requirement that drivers stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. This study examined whether this change had an effect on pedestrian safety in the United States, with its focus on low-speed roads. To examine the association between changes in pedestrian laws and changes in pedestrian-involved fatal crashes, three approaches were employed: before-after analysis, time-series analysis, and cross-sectional analysis. Pedestrian-involved fatal traffic crashes on low-speed roads were extracted from the U.S. national fatal crash database, the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), from 1980 through 2005. This study found no statistically significant reduction in pedestrian-involved fatal crashes attributable to changes in the laws, yet this finding is not definitive because of study limitations such as the omission of relevant exposure data.
- Published
- 2009
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