Pedestrian safety evaluation of urban areas in Hong Kong

Abstract

Being a sub-topic under road safety, pedestrian safety is closely related to every member of Hong Kong. Every person who walk on streets is pedestrians, regardless his or her purposes. Since pedestrians are vulnerable road users, not only can maintaining safety and walkable environment on pavements and pedestrian crossings improve personal safety of pedestrians and walkability of the city, but also keep Hong Kong productive and sustainable. Currently, when asked about the level of pedestrian safety on any street in Hong Kong, people can only respond with an arbitrary adjective based on subjective assessments or historical data about traffic casualties involving pedestrians. Since no two persons are homogeneous, one’s perception can hardly represent another’s. Meanwhile, conducting pedestrian safety evaluation using the historical data is passive. It would always be too late to perform the evaluation only after a traffic accident happens. Pedestrian safety should always be safeguard. This dissertation aims at establishing a model for evaluating pedestrian safety and testing it with its application on selected study sites in the urban areas of Hong Kong. The results reveal that the level of pedestrian safety at residential area is generally higher than that in commercial districts. Maintaining surface condition of pavements, implementations of measures for separating pedestrians from road traffics and safe pedestrian crossings and educating the general public to become responsible pedestrians are the keys to improve pedestrian safety in the urban areas of Hong Kong.