Implications of Pedestrian Safety Planning Factors in Areas with Minority and Low-Income Populations

Minority status and low-income are two important criteria on which environmental-justice areas are being identified. These unique areal characteristics have been of particular interest to traffic safety analysts in investigating pedestrian safety planning factors in deprived areas. In this study, a pedestrian crash model was developed for these areas explicitly accounting for the spatial autocorrelations of different zonal factors commonly used in the traditional transportation planning models. It was found that the Bayesian Poisson-lognormal model with a spatial effect term performed the best compared to the models without accounting for spatial autocorrelations.