Are our Cities Making our Roads Unsafe? The Impact of Land Use Configurations on Child Pedestrian Injuries ( poster )

Abstract

Background Walking for transportation during childhood has many important health and social benefits as it encourages physical activity and independence. Yet, children are often not able or allowed to safely and comfortably walk to their destinations, with traffic safety being one of the primary barriers to such active transportation in children. Every hour, an average of 40 children die on roadways around the world, most of whom are vulnerable road users such as pedestrians. Despite the unfortunate road safety statistics of child pedestrians and the known health benefits of childhood walking, our transportation networks remain alarmingly dangerous for the few children that still walk independently. Aim The purpose of this work is to understand how development patterns lead to variable safety outcomes in transportation systems. More specifically, this work explores the role that land use plays in undesirable child pedestrian safety outcomes in order to better define urban design best practices. Are roadways in low-density residential areas more or less safe than similar roadways in high-density residential communities or in mixed-use neighborhoods? Method The roadway and pedestrian networks, land use configuration, and child pedestrian injuries in the City of Los Angeles, USA are studied through GIS spatial and statistical analysis. All data is in spatial shapefile format, provided by the City of Los Angeles' Data Catalog. A Kruskal-Wallis one-way analysis of variance is used through IBM SPSS. Results Findings from the statistical analysis suggest that, all else being controlled for, roadways in mixed-use neighborhoods see fewer child pedestrian injuries, while low-density single use neighborhoods see significantly more child pedestrian injuries. These findings indicate that proper planning and the employment of appropriate urban strategies can help to stem pedestrian safety issues before they occur. Conclusions Our modern practice of isolating disparate uses is detrimental to public health and safety and should be amended. By making our urban transportation systems more amenable to child pedestrians, we will make our transportation systems safer for everyone, thereby reaping considerable environmental, economic, and social benefits.