Pedestrian Safety Committee
In mid-2000, Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson responded to his personal near auto-pedestrian incident as well as to a national study titled “Mean Streets 2000” declaring Salt Lake City as “not pedestrian friendly” by creating the Pedestrian Safety Committee. The city’s Transportation Division took the leading role in the project to identify and implement pedestrian safety measures with the overall goal of reducing pedestrian-involved accidents.
The Pedestrian Safety Committee is comprised of city staff from the city’s transportation, police, attorney, ADA, street maintenance and mayor's offices. Periodically, citizens and others interested in pedestrian safety also participate in committee meetings. A two-step approach is used to accomplish its purpose. First, members review available local statistical data, research literature, and brainstorm ideas believed to improve pedestrian safety. Second, when an initiative is ready to be implemented, an "educate/implement/enforce" rollout method is employed. This typically involves a media release combined with a staged, on-street unveiling by the mayor with television and newsprint media coverage. This purposeful, flamboyant unveiling has proven highly effective in educating the public of the latest pedestrian safety initiative and provides a focused opportunity to remind them of previous initiatives and the importance of pedestrian safety. The media event is usually scheduled to coincide with the finishing touches of installation to provide the media with unique photo opportunities. After implementation, city police publicly schedule targeted enforcement of the new initiative. This enforcement may involve warnings or citations. It includes enforcement of violations by drivers as well as by pedestrians to avoid any sense of favoritism.
Pedestrian safety measures implemented thus far by the Pedestrian Safety Committee include: crosswalk flags and the Adopt-a-Crosswalk program, pedestrian related city ordinance modifications, pedestrian related educational brochures, longer traffic signal WALK phases, pedestrian countdown timers, pedestrian-actuated overhead flashing lights, "LOOK" crosswalk pavement markings and advance crosswalk pavement markings.
We have found the majority of our pedestrian safety initiatives to be inexpensive to implement and popular with the public. The community-wide increase in pedestrian safety awareness and anecdotal evidence of fewer near-miss incidents are as important as they are incalculable. In addition, although it is still too soon to tell for sure through statistics if accident rates will remain at their current levels long term, the Salt Lake City Police Department has reported a citywide pedestrian accident rate reduction of 16% in 2002 and a 20% reduction within the Central Business District as compared with 2001.
The city’s Pedestrian Safety Committee has been an excellent forum to create and evaluate safety initiatives and we intend to continue developing and implementing new initiatives.
