Evaluating safety and compliance of pedestrian crossings in rural contexts: A before and after study of RRFBs and LED-embedded signs.

Improving the safety of pedestrian and cyclist infrastructure is critical for reducing traffic-related injuries and fatalities. Pedestrian traffic safety risks are heightened in rural contexts. A key area of focus is the protection of pedestrians crossing roadways between intersections and in high-risk areas such as rural to urban transition zones. One way to reduce safety risks for pedestrians is through the use of crossing treatments such as rectangular rapid flashing beacons (RRFBs) and pedestrian activated LED-embedded signs (LESs), which use a pedestrian activated beacon to increase drivers' awareness of pedestrians. Prior research on these treatments leaves open questions about their effectiveness, particularly in rural contexts. Consequently, rural communities have limited guidance for their use. We address this gap by evaluating the effectiveness of RRFBs and LESs in small and rural communities in Vermont using a rigorous before-after observational study design. Our results indicate that RRFBs improve compliance and safety in rural and small community contexts, while LESs have little to no effect on compliance and safety. Our findings hold in both central locations and rural to urban transition zones.

Evaluating public transit agency responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in seven U.S. regions.

The Covid-19 pandemic's impacts on public transit will be felt for years, if not longer. In a few short weeks in 2020, the nature of day-to-day travel shifted around the world. Many of those who were able to stay at home did so while a large majority of those who needed to continue traveling moved away from public transit if they had alternatives available. For their part, public transit agencies responded with rapid service adjustments during March 2020, making varying efforts to communicate with riders and the public during this time so that users could understand how service was changing and how it would affect them. The impacts of the pandemic were dramatic-public transit ridership dropped by nearly 80% in April 2020 across the United States as the unemployment rate reached 14%-worse than any month during the Great Recession. But agency responses were nonuniform. In this paper, we characterize how seven public transit operators in the United States-those responsible for 55% of all unlinked trips in 2019-adapted service during the pandemic using quantitative performance information and a review of agency press releases. We also assess impacts on riders for whom public transit is essential. We find that pandemic-era changes largely did not change existing disparities between groups, suggesting that baseline inequities did not worsen as overall service levels fell. Understanding transit agency behaviors using different data sources is a first step towards linking agency responses with outcomes. This type of analysis that blends quantitative performance analysis with qualitative data can also provide insight into how agencies can adapt to future crises.

Covid-19 pandemic impacts on essential transit riders: Findings from a U.S. Survey.

The Covid-19 pandemic has decimated public transit service across the United States and caused significant decreases in ridership. Little is known about the reasons for unevenness in pandemic-era mode shifts and the impacts of pandemic-related transit reductions on riders' day-to-day lives. Using a national survey of U.S. transit riders (n = 500) conducted in fall 2020, this study examines changes in transit use since the pandemic began, the reasons for transit reductions, and the effects of reduced transit use and transit service on transit riders' ability to meet their travel needs. The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated existing transportation burdens for those who have limited mobility options, those facing socioeconomic challenges, Hispanic or Latinx riders, and female, non-binary or genderqueer people. We close with recommendations for strengthening transit service for these groups in the long term as we recover from the pandemic.

Validating and Refining EPA's Traffic Exposure Screening Measure.

Exposure to high air pollutant concentrations results in significant health risks. Many communities of color and low-income communities face disproportionately higher levels of air pollution exposure. Environmental justice (EJ) screening tools play a critical role in focusing early attention on areas with a high likelihood of disparate health impacts. In 2015, the United States Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) released EJScreen, a screening tool with indicators of a range of pollution burdens across the US. However, little is known about the accuracy of the screening estimates of pollution exposure. This study compares EJScreen's traffic proximity air quality metric to dispersion modeling results. Using the area around the Houston Ship Channel, we conduct fine-grained air pollution dispersion modeling to evaluate how closely EJScreen's indicator approximates estimated roadway air pollution concentrations. We find low correlation between modeled concentrations and the EJScreen roadway air pollution indicator. We extend EJScreen's roadway air pollution screening method in three ways: (1) using a smaller unit of analysis, (2) accounting for the length of each road segment, and (3) accounting for wind direction. Using the Houston region, we use two of the methods and show that the proposed extensions provide a more accurate transportation air pollution screening assessment at the regional and local level.