CHAPTER 5
Looking Forward: New Standards to Meet Todayʼs Safety Challenges

The research and information in this guide demonstrate that there are myriad actions across the pillars of the Safe System Approach that local and state transportation and planning agencies can take now to create a holistic, systemic approach to improving pedestrian safety at night. These actions range from spot countermeasure improvements and corridor-wide systemic improvements along higher-risk roadways to safety policies such as speed management, planning policies related to zoning, weight taxes and fleet purchasing strategies to mitigate the harms of higher-risk vehicles, and crash analysis and evaluation with a nighttime focus. This guide aims to help communities eliminate fatalities and serious injuries, which inherently includes improving pedestrian safety at night, and improve the transportation system through design and policy choices made over time. Underlying all these actions and strategies is the reality that agencies at the local, regional, state, and federal levels can proactively make choices different from those made in the past to experience different outcomes in the future.

Reversing the increasing number of pedestrian fatalities in the United States can be accomplished by changing roadway design approaches and standards. Over the past few decades, researchers and practitioners have amassed a solid understanding that speed is the primary mechanism of injury severity and that roadway design and operations fundamentally influence willingness and ability of drivers to watch for and yield to people walking. Walking is a fundamental human behavior and a primary travel mode that provides access to all other modes of travel, not an amenity that can be optionally included. National standards and guidance would allow for the inclusion of safe, convenient pedestrian infrastructure throughout the transportation system.

More research would be helpful to determine best practices for roadway design in nighttime conditions, particularly on multilane, high-speed roadways. Roadway design standards are often based on daytime conditions and ignore the challenges road users face when navigating the system at night. For example, driver brake reaction time is based on daytime conditions and needs to be evaluated under nighttime conditions, given that it takes longer for a driver to detect an object in darkness. Other design standards that may be evaluated include stopping sight distance, decision sight distance, and intersection sight triangles.

It is also important for transportation practitioners to revise the traditional approach to intersection operations from a vehicular focus to a focus on all roadway users. Out-of-date methods that analyze only vehicles during peak periods for a future year too often result in overdesigned roadways planned for capacity that is decades away, if ever achieved. In the intervening decades, lives are lost and communities are harmed due to roadways that encourage high-speed behavior during off-peak hours, and particularly in darkness. An all-road-user approach provides a more holistic view of roadway needs and a strategy to create a safer, more accessible and sustainable network. For more information on this approach and to understand the trade-offs between

cross-sectional allocations and vehicular capacity, refer to NCHRP Research Report 1036: Roadway Cross-Section Reallocation: A Guide (Semler et al. 2023).

Studying proven safety countermeasures in dark conditions could help illuminate their effectiveness at night. In the absence of those studies, transportation professionals can use counter measures that are effective in both daytime and nighttime conditions, combining countermeasures where needed to increase effectiveness. For more information on combining countermeasures for pedestrian safety, see NCHRP Research Report 926: Guidance to Improve Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety at Intersections (Sanders et al. 2020), in addition to the other resources referenced in this guide.

Additionally, roadway design standards have not adapted to changes in vehicle design over the years. The larger, taller, and heavier vehicles that constitute most new vehicle sales, particularly if they possess a boxy or blunt hood design, increase injury severity risk and are far larger than the design vehicle of most roadway design guidance. Metrics such as braking distance, deceleration and acceleration time, the driverʼs eye height, and sight distance need to be tested using these newer vehicles to determine whether and how those values need to be adjusted.

This guide presents established research and a slate of tools that practitioners can use today to improve pedestrian safety in darkness while waiting for new research and updated standards. In brief:

• Use proven and promising countermeasures and design principles to retrofit roadways to manage driver speeds during daytime and nighttime conditions and reduce the potential for severe injury to pedestrians. Aim for self-enforcing roadways to the degree possible.
• Incorporate context-sensitive, consistent lighting to help drivers and pedestrians see each other when traveling at night.
• Design convenient, marked pedestrian crosswalks with supportive traffic control devices throughout the roadway system and particularly where pedestrian demand exists, such as at transit stops, schools, areas of high-density housing, and grocery and convenience stores.
• Use automated speed enforcement and ISA wherever possible as a stopgap to manage speed on higher-risk roadways, especially during lower-traffic nighttime conditions.
• Employ design and operational countermeasures to mitigate the harms of higher-risk vehicles.
• Encourage policymakers to evaluate and implement policies to mitigate the harms of higher-risk vehicles, such as weight taxes and fleet purchasing strategies.
• Explicitly study nighttime safety and incorporate what is learned back into design and policy practice so that the field is continuously improving.
• Work to strengthen the base of the Safe System Pyramid to the degree possible and through support for partner agencies that may be more directly involved in social services. For example, support the provision of network-wide transit and roadway design that is low risk for populations such as those experiencing houselessness or using substances.
• Prioritize investments in communities that lack accessible pedestrian infrastructure to improve safety outcomes among those most likely to be at risk.