A team including Professor Greg Lindsey of the Humphrey School of Public Affairs received the Best Paper Award–Highest Score for Publication from the Bicycle Transportation Committee of the Transportation Research Board (TRB) last month. The committee accepted nearly 60 papers for presentation at the 2021 TRB Annual Meeting, held virtually in January.
Lindsey collaborated on the paper with a team of researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee led by Associate Professor Robert J. Schneider. The paper—titled “Exposure-Based Models of Trail User Crashes at Roadway Crossings”—describes their development of a trail-crossing crash model, one of the first currently available.
Many trail-crossing design guidelines suggest best practices to make trail crossings safe, but few studies have quantified the statistical relationship between trail-user crashes and a broad set of trail-crossing characteristics. For their work, the team used trail-user crashes reported at 197 crossings in the Minneapolis and Milwaukee regions between 2011 and 2018.
The results of the study will help develop the foundation of systemic safety analyses for trail crossings, Lindsey says. This foundation can help planners prioritize high-risk locations for physical design changes and other programmatic improvements. The findings can also inform trail-crossing design guidelines, he adds.
