RDOs Help Make Walking Safer

By Amy Linehan, Legislative Representative

It’s a scene played out every day in cities and small towns across the nation. The traffic light changes from yellow to red, but one driver decides that the red light doesn’t apply to him, and he goes barreling through the intersection. Pedestrians preparing to make their way across the street are forced to jump back onto the sidewalk to avoid getting hit.

Pedestrian safety continues to be an issue in America. According to the National Safety Council, approximately 5,900 pedestrians are killed by automobiles every year while 84,000 suffer nonfatal injuries. Last year alone, almost 5,000 Americans died while crossing the street, walking to school or work, going to a bus stop, or walking to the store and over the ten-year period from 1994 to 2003, more than 50,000 pedestrians died after being hit.

In an effort to reduce the numbers of these needless tragedies, a growing number of communities are implementing measures to make their neighborhoods more walkable and are using regional development organizations (RDOs) to implement traffic-calming measures. In 2001, the Champaign County Regional Planning Commission (CCRPC) in Urbana, IL began a pilot project to upgrade cross walk signals in their region to “accessible pedestrian signals,” an Intelligent Transportation System component. The signals visually and verbally notify pedestrians when it is safe to cross an intersection and can be remotely controlled.

CCRPC is the region’s designated metropolitan transportation planning organization (MPO). The MPO was approached by the Central Illinois Council for the Blind in November 2000 to improve intersection crossings. CCRPC reviewed the region’s transportation improvement program (TIP) and found that the signal upgrades minimized pedestrian-vehicular conflict. Using a TIP study, CCRPC incorporated the signal upgrades into a Street Escape Project. By making it an MPO project and TIP objective, CCRPC obtained local funding from the cities of Champaign and Urbana , and the University of Illinois, to study 25 intersections and solicited the necessary public and agency input to select two pilot locations. Recommendations from CCRPC were incorporated into the Illinois Department of Transportation’s overall pedestrian safety plan.

The two pilot replacements were completed in the spring of 2002 and since then more than 10 signal lights in the Champaign/Urbana region have been upgraded. The upgrade included traffic lane reductions and sidewalk widening to decrease ambient noise, permitting pedestrians to hear the signals. According to CCRPC’s Transportation Engineer, Rita Morocoima-Black, “Since the implementation of the project, CCRPC is contacted daily with additional requests to upgrade signal lights.”

For more information contact Rita Morocoima-Black at 217.328.3313 ext.136 or rblack@ccrprc.org.

This article is funded under an agreement with the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration.