Through the National Roadway Safety Strategy, the Department will focus on using all available tools, including education, outreach, engineering solutions, and enforcement, to address persistent behavioral safety issues. A robust and comprehensive approach to influencing human behavior also requires deepening our understanding of underlying causes through research.

Key Departmental Actions to Enable Safer People

Design roadway environments to mitigate human mistakes and account for injury tolerances, to encourage safer behaviors, and to facilitate safe travel by the most vulnerable users.
Roadway design strongly influences how people use roadways. The environment around the roadway system—including land use and the intersections of highways, roads, and streets with other transportation modes such as rail and transit—also shapes the safety risks borne by the traveling public.
U.S. DOT has advanced an initiative to develop a growing collection of Proven Safety Countermeasures that offers effective strategies to reduce fatalities and serious injuries on our Nation’s roadways.

Proven Safety Countermeasures
The Proven Safety Countermeasures initiative is a collection of countermeasures and strategies effective in reducing roadway fatalities and serious injuries on our Nation’s highways.
Four sample countermeasures improve pedestrian, cyclist, and rural roadway safety:

Crosswalk Visibility Enhancements
Poor lighting conditions, obstructions such as parked cars, and horizontal or vertical roadway curvature can reduce visibility at crosswalks, contributing to safety issues. For multilane roadway crossings where vehicle volumes are in excess of 10,000 Average Annual Daily Traffic (AADT), a marked crosswalk alone is typically not sufficient. Under such conditions, more substantial crossing improvements could prevent an increase in pedestrian crash potential.

High-visibility crosswalks
High-visibility crosswalks use patterns (i.e., bar pairs, continental, ladder) that are visible to both the driver and pedestrian from farther away compared to traditional transverse line crosswalks. They should be considered at all midblock pedestrian crossings and uncontrolled intersections. Agencies should use materials such as inlay or thermoplastic tape, instead of paint or brick, for highly reflective crosswalk markings.

Improved Lighting
The goal of crosswalk lighting should be to illuminate with positive contrast to make it easier for a driver to visually identify the pedestrian. This involves carefully placing the luminaires in forward locations to avoid a silhouette effect of the pedestrian.

Enhanced Signing and Pavement Markings
On multilane roadways, agencies can use “YIELD Here to Pedestrians“ or ”STOP Here for Pedestrians“ signs 20 to 50 feet in advance of a marked crosswalk to indicate where a driver should stop or yield to pedestrians, depending on State law. To supplement the signing, agencies can also install a STOP or YIELD bar (commonly referred to as “shark’s teeth”) pavement markings.

In-street signing, such as “STOP Here for Pedestrians “or” YIELD Here to Pedestrians “may be appropriate on roads with two- or three-lane roads where speed limits are 30 miles per hour or less.

Medians and Pedestrian Refuge Islands in Urban and Suburban Areas
A median is the area between opposing lanes of traffic, excluding turn lanes. Medians in urban and suburban areas can be defined by pavement markings, raised medians, or islands to separate motorized and non-motorized road users.

A pedestrian refuge island (or crossing area) is a median with a refuge area that is intended to help protect pedestrians who are crossing a road.

Pedestrian crashes account for approximately 17 percent of all traffic fatalities annually, and 74 percent of these occur at non-intersection locations.1 For pedestrians to safely cross a roadway, they must estimate vehicle speeds, determine acceptable gaps in traffic based on their walking speed, and predict vehicle paths. Installing a median or pedestrian refuge island can help improve safety by allowing pedestrians to cross one direction of traffic at a time.

Transportation agencies should consider medians or pedestrian refuge islands in curbed sections of urban and suburban multilane roadways, particularly in areas with a significant mix of pedestrian and vehicle traffic, traffic volumes over 9,000 vehicles per day, and travel speeds 35 mph or greater. Medians/refuge islands should be at least 4-ft wide, but preferably 8 ft for pedestrian comfort.
Some example locations that may benefit from medians or pedestrian refuge islands include:

• Mid-block crossings.

• Approaches to multilane intersections.

• Areas near transit stops or other pedestrian-focused sites.