news>>awards>>Mitman among eisenhower master's presenters
Meghan Mitman, a graduate student at ITS Berkeley pursuing dual Master's degrees in City and Regional Planning and Transportation Engineering, was awarded an Eisenhower Fellowship in 2006. As an Eisenhower Master's award winner, she also presented her work at the 2006 annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board. Her project is described below:
Toward a Best Practices Guide for Pedestrian Safety Crosswalk Countermeasures in California
Meghan Mitman, Project Director, David Ragland, Ph.D. Principal Investigator Project Team: Jill Cooper, Chris Congleton, and Andrew Duszak University of California at Berkeley – Traffic Safety Center
"A great number of pedestrian injures and deaths are due to the failure of both drivers and pedestrians to follow the vehicle code. In order to reduce pedestrian injury and fatalities, traffic safety practitioners need to better understand driver and pedestrian knowledge of the law and behavior in various crosswalk scenarios.
"The Traffic Safety Center at UC Berkeley, on behalf of Caltrans, is undertaking a study of these issues in an effort to develop recommendations for 3-E (engineering, education, and enforcement) countermeasures to increase driver and pedestrian compliance of the law and to mitigate danger when violations occur.
"This study builds primarily on the significant findings of prior research efforts on this topic, particularly Herms (1972), Knoblauch (2001), and Zegeer (2002).
"In addition to a comprehensive literature review, which will consider knowledge of the vehicle code, behavior at crosswalks, and countermeasure performance from a driver and pedestrian perspective, this study will contribute original data in the form of surveys, focus groups, and field observations.The field observations will fill in missing pieces from previous studies by focusing on driver and pedestrian behavior at unsignalized intersections on multi-lane roads with unmarked crosswalks, marked crosswalks, and other advanced crosswalk treatments.
"This study will conclude with the development of a Best Practices Manual for local, regional, and state practitioners in California. The manual will discuss conflicts commonly found between pedestrians and vehicles at crosswalks, reasons for these conflicts, and an analysis of which countermeasures or combinations of countermeasures have proven most effective in specific conflict scenarios."
