Pedestrian crashes are among the most common causes of death and serious injury to young children in the developed world. An initial phase of our research showed that younger children (6-7 year olds) and those with poor or under-developed functional skills may be at higher risk of crash involvement, compared with older children with well developed skills. While education is considered an essent...

Every year, more than 400 people are killed in over 1200 accidents at road-rail level crossings in the European Union. Together with tunnels and specific road black spots, level crossings (LC) have been identified as being a particular weak point in road infrastructure, seriously jeopardizing road safety. Safety at LC is a single part of a wider picture of transport safety within the whole tran...

The assessment of the safety of road crossing facilities in urban scenarios can be supported by means of advanced computer-based simulations. Integrated models considering the vehicular and pedestrian traffic, and their interactions, still lack empirical evidences about the heterogeneous features of pedestrians, with particular reference to age-driven crossing behaviour. Elderly pedestrians are...

A new and simple image processing approach for the measurement of the length of pedestrian crossings with a view to develop a travel aid for the blind people is described. In a crossing, the usual black road surface is painted with constant width periodic white bands. The crossing length is estimated using vector geometry from the leftand the right-border lines, the first-, the secondand the en...

The impacts of potential linear barriers such as roads, highways, and power lines on rainforest fauna are poorly understood. In the central Brazilian Amazon, we compared the frequency of local movements (<300 m long) of understory birds within intact forest and across a 30-to 40-m-wide road over a 2-year period. Rainforest had regenerated along some road verges, to the extent that a nearly comp...

The present study aimed to investigate both the on road behaviour of Belgian school students and the validity of the Adolescent Road User Behaviour Questionnaire (ARBQ) in a sample of students attending school in Belgium. In total, 294 adolescents completed the ARBQ along with measures of their self-reported accident involvement and sensation seeking behaviour. Confirmatory Factor Analysis supp...

OBJECTIVES Young children, children from lower socioeconomic status and boys have the highest risk of pedestrian injury. This study examined the relationship between cognition and specific pedestrian skills of these groups of children in Iran. METHODS 180 Iranian children aged 7 and 11 years from lower- and higher-socioeconomic status backgrounds participated in the study. A task to identify ...

Efforts to reduce the negative impacts of roads on wildlife may be hindered if individuals within the population vary widely in their responses to roads and mitigation strategies ignore this variability. This knowledge is particularly important for medium-sized carnivores as they are vulnerable to road mortality, while also known to use available road passages (e.g., drainage culverts) for safe...

This study examines the relationship between train traffic and the accident risk for road users at level crossings. The marginal effect of train traffic on the accident risk can be used to derive the marginal cost per train passage that is due to level crossing accidents. Based on Swedish data from 2000 to 2012 on level crossing accidents, train volume and crossing characteristics, the marginal...

Adolescent pedestrians are a particularly vulnerable group of road users. This research tested the applicability of the recently developed Adolescent Road user Behaviour Questionnaire (ARBQ) amongst a sample of 2006 Spanish adolescents. Confirmatory Factor Analysis of the full scale found that the original three factors did not adequately fit the data, but an acceptable fit was obtained for the...