Improving pedestrian safety while simultaneously making communities more walkable and meeting traffic flow needs indeed presents a difficult challenge to engineers and local officials. But the need is clear, and many cities throughout California – including Santa Monica, Santa Rosa, Oakland, West Hollywood, Pasadena and Long Beach – have initiated aggressive programs to improve both safety and walkability. These cities recognize that not only is it of paramount importance to improve the safety of pedestrians, but that encouraging walking has many other benefits. Pedestrians can enhance the liveliness of urban environments, making both business districts and residential neighborhoods interesting and safer because pedestrians provide "eyes on the street."

In many ways walking as well as bicycling could be ideal ways to get around in California’s cities and suburbs where a bulk of all trips still cover rather short distances despite sprawling development patterns. "These non-motorized travel modes cause virtually no noise or pollution," write authors John Pucher and Lewis Dijkstra in a paper entitled "Making Walking and Bicycling Safer: Lessons from Europe." "The only energy they require is provided directly by the traveler, and the very generation of that energy offers valuable cardiovascular exercise. Neither walking or cycling requires much space. Moreover they are quite economical, costing much less than the auto and public transport, both in direct user costs and public infrastructure costs."(45)

Since so many of our streets are being designed exclusively to accommodate increasing traffic, it will indeed take more than a crosswalk and walk signal to make them safe and inviting for pedestrians. Local officials will have to revisit land use and housing policies that encourage sprawl, which make walking both inconvenient and dangerous. But there are also many things that transportation engineers and local officials can do to retrofit city streets.

Modifications include the addition of clearly marked crosswalks with zebra striping; provision of wide sidewalks on both sides of the street; pedestrian-activated crossing signals; intersection modifications including the re-timing of traffic signals; the addition of medians or pedestrian refuge islands in the middle of wide streets; and traffic calming measures that reduce the speed of motorists and give more space and priority to pedestrians.

Traffic calming is one of the techniques that has been proven effective and which is advocated by many researchers studying pedestrian injuries and deaths. Though traffic calming has been widely implemented in Europe, it has not been in the U.S., where some see this as conflicting with the need to maintain or improve levels of service for roadways. Traffic calming includes a variety of changes that slow or divert vehicle traffic, separate pedestrian pathways from vehicle traffic, and make the road corridor more pleasant.

Common traffic calming measures include physical design measures that draw attention to the presence of pedestrians, such as raised intersections and crosswalks, and "bulb-outs" that extend the corners of the sidewalk into the street so as to shorten the crossing distance and make pedestrians more visible. Other measures include road narrowing, and the creation of zigzag routes and curves. Traffic circles and roundabouts are also used to slow traffic.

Area-wide traffic calming in neighborhoods in the Netherlands has reduced traffic accidents by 20-70 percent.(46) Traffic calming in German neighborhoods has reduced traffic injuries by 20-70 percent and serious traffic inuries by 35-56 percent.(47) A comprehensive review of traffic calming impacts in Denmark, Great Britain, Germany and the Netherlands found that traffic injuries fell by an average of 53 percent in traffic-calmed neighborhoods.(48)

Pedestrian accidents in 1999 alone cost California nearly $4 billion, yet spending on the pedestrian safety measures is a mere fraction of that figure. Caltrans and California’s cities, counties and regional transportation agencies should dedicate funding to traffic safety programs in proportion to traffic deaths. If 20 percent of traffic fatalities are pedestrians, it stands to reason that a similar amount of safety funds should be devoted to pedestrian safety. Caltrans now devotes less than one percent of its federal traffic safety funding to projects that improve the safety of pedestrians.

Regional and county transportation agencies should set aside 10 percent of their Regional Transportation Improvement Program (RTIP) and Surface Transportation Improvement Program (STIP) funds for community enhancement activities including pedestrian and bicycle-oriented projects and facilities.

The trend toward removing crosswalks under the guise of enhanced pedestrian safety makes no more sense than removing traffic signals at intersections in order to make motorists more cautious. We need to be doing more for pedestrians statewide, not less. The California Department of Transportation should do everything in its power to revisit its crosswalk removal policies and encourage other local agencies to suspend the current practice until further review is possible. Issues of safety and liability should be addressed head on and changes made to the California Vehicle Code to ensure that liability concerns don’t prevent agencies from providing the most basic facilities for pedestrians.

California develop a new state standard for a basic crosswalk, requiring a more visible design (such as ladder crosswalks with zebra stripes) as well as overhead signs and lights for all crossings that occur on major streets with heavy traffic.

Traffic calming is but one part of a broader effort to fundamentally refocus the design of both streets and communities so that walking is safe and convenient. Encouraging pedestrian travel means designing communities so that people have somewhere to walk to. That means developing neighborhoods where residents are within a reasonable walking distance of shops, offices, schools, libraries and transit stops. According to the American Planning Association’s "Best Development Practices," the best neighborhoods for walking are developed in small clusters. The street network in these neighborhoods should include multiple connections and direct routes that allow pedestrians to choose the shortest distance to a destination. Schools should also be placed so children can walk and bike without having to cross wide, high-speed streets.

When it comes to designing roads engineers traditionally begin at the centerline and by the time they reach the road edge they have run out of room for "amenities" for pedestrians. New design policy guidelines issued by the Federal Highway Administration recommend that state and local planners and road builders drop that approach and design all facilities from the start with pedestrians and bicyclists in mind. A Caltrans Pedestrian Safety Task Force last year issued a similar recommendation: "Project planning processes should encourage the early integration of pedestrian access and safety issues in all highway improvement projects," write the authors of the task force’s final report. "Proposed transportation improvements should consider and include where appropriate the needs and safety concerns of pedestrians in every phase of the project from planning to project completion." All facilities should be designed for the disabled and meet basic standards established in the Americans with Disabilities Act.

Another fundamental step in improving pedestrian safety is to collect more information about pedestrian fatalities and injuries, the amount of walking and the risks associated with walking, the effectiveness of pedestrian safety measures, and how much is spent on pedestrian facilities. More data should also be collected on the ethnicity of pedestrians who are hit in order to better understand who is getting hurt and which segments of the population should be targeted for pedestrian safety initiatives.

Most agencies collect only information about vehicle traffic, which facilitates and encourages discussions around levels of service for automobiles. No agency collects data on levels of service for pedestrians. The little data that is collected on pedestrians is incomplete and often inaccurate, making it hard to document safety problems and making it easy for officials to overlook pedestrians entirely. As one official said, "What gets counted counts."