Pedestrian risk perception of marked and unmarked crosswalks in Kumasi, Ghana

Pedestrians constitute the majority of all urban road crashes in Ghana, yet there is inadequate supply of pedestrian facilities, and road-user behaviours have been cited as a major contributing factor to the high crash rates. This study seeks to investigate how pedestrians perceive risk at different crosswalks. The study adopted a mixed-method approach, where secondary crash data for 30 selected crosswalks was correlated with corresponding primary data that consisted of pedestrian surveys. The crash data from 2011 through 2014 was obtained from the database of the Building and Road Research Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR-BRRI) in Kumasi, and supplemented with a survey of 900 pedestrians. The results revealed that pedestrians perceived marked crosswalks to be safer than unmarked crosswalks, but this is contrary to the crash records. Also, most of the crashes were registered for crosswalks located across multilane highways. In light of these results, it is recommended that the safety features of crosswalks be re-examined, while restricting indiscriminate crossing by channelling pedestrians to designated protected crossing points, installing traffic control devices and other speed-calming devices at identified high-risk crosswalks, and signalising crosswalks that are located on multilane roads. It is also recommended to intensify road safety campaigns and public education on safe road-crossing practices, while enforcing traffic safety laws to influence road-user behaviours

Framework for integrating indigenous and scientific knowledge for transportation planning in developing countries

Conventional transportation planning is developed based on theories that originate from industrialized countries and is based on the rational/comprehensive model, which is an exercise in data manipulation. The basic requirements of the process are the availability of large amounts of good data and analytic capabilities. These are readily available in industrialized countries, but often lacking in developing countries, hence the need to explore other non-traditional methods for project evaluation. This research documents a framework suggested for screening urban transportation projects in developing countries to reflect local issues relevant to sustainability. The framework is based on the integration of indigenous and scientific knowledge to reflect the sustainability of candidate projects. This is achieved through a transactive or dialogical instrumentalism and social learning, to integrate inputs from system users and providers to produce a term defined as the Localized Sustainability Score (LSS). This is a method that readily identifies with the consensus building tradition of local communities in developing countries. The LSS of the projects are then used to produce a relative ranking of potential projects, for use as a decision support for project screening and selection. The proposed method was developed through a case study in Accra, Ghana and the results indicate that the framework adequately represented local sustainable transportation needs, priorities and perceptions. The LSS determined for some selected projects maintained the original relative rankings that were already derived using conventional methods. The LSS also has the added advantage of evaluating projects of different scales. (Published By University of Alabama Libraries