A proactive approach to assess safety level of urban bus stops

Abstract

Road safety has emerged as a global concern, and bus stops are the major points of concern as they act as interfaces where pedestrians interact with transit vehicles. In order to achieve a safe and sustainable infrastructure at bus stops, it is necessary to assess safety level of bus stops and suggest safety improvement measures. The present work aims to investigate whether design and management deficiencies of bus stops have any effect on safety of passengers and pedestrians. It is also aimed to develop a pro-active approach for evaluating safety level of bus stops by identifying design and management deficiencies. The methodology includes (i) identification of unsafe acts and causal factors at bus stops, (ii) classification of causal factors under design and management deficiencies, (iii) estimation of weightage of causal factors, (iv) fuzzy evaluation of bus stops, (v) calculation of safety levels of bus stops, and (vi) validation of the methodology using crash data. While a combination of Fuzzy AHP and RIDIT analysis was used to estimate the weightage of causal factors, a fuzzy-scoring-based expert field investigation was carried out to assess design and management deficiencies of bus stops. The methodology was applied to evaluate the safety level of bus stops located along a major urban corridor in Kolkata, India.