Social Network Effects on Attitudes about Pedestrian Street Crossing Behaviour: Preliminary Findings

The effectiveness of interventions to improve pedestrian safety, whether involving engineering, education, or enforcement, is limited by the behavior of the public in response to the interventions. It is not difficult to imagine that the behavioral response of an individual to engineering and educational road safety interventions may be at least partially explained by demographic characteristics. It is also plausible that membership and interactions in a social group influences an individual’s behavior and attitudes about road safety and response to such interventions. This paper describes preliminary findings from a project that is employing a mixed survey framework of in-person gatherings and online respondent driven sampling surveys to explore how demographics, pedestrian safety education and social group membership and interaction explain an individual’s behavior and attitudes related to crossing a signalized intersection as a pedestrian in different physical and travel settings. This paper describes the findings from small size in-person samples. Multinomial logit modeling will be applied to predict stated pedestrian behavior. The results will shed light on pedestrian attitudes about traffic signal design and operation as well as identify how to most effectively improve pedestrian safety through education and social group interaction.