Pedestrian behavior and safety at roundabouts are not well understood, particularly for pedestrians with sensory or mobility impairments. A previous study in which participants indicated when they would cross suggested that blind pedestrians miss more crossing opportunities and make riskier judgments than sighted pedestrians. The present study replicated these findings and analyzed actual street crossings. Six blind and six sighted pedestrians negotiated a double-lane urban roundabout under high and low traffic volumes. Blind participants waited three times longer to cross than sighted participants. About 6% of the blind participants' crossing attempts were judged dangerous enough to require intervention, compared to none for sighted pedestrians. Drivers yielded frequently on the entry lanes but not the exit lanes. Sighted participants accepted drivers' yields, whereas blind participants rarely did so. Blind-sighted differences are interpreted in terms of auditory access to information about traffic, and policy implications are discussed regarding accessibility of transportation systems.
This paper reports two experiments about street crossing under conditions of free flowing traffic, with a focus on modem roundabout intersections. Experiment 1 was conducted at three roundabouts varying in size and traffic volume. Six totally blind and six sighted adults judged whether gaps in traffic were long enough to permit crossing to the median (splitter) island before the next vehicle arrived. Gap distributions and measures of judgment quality are reported. Overall, blind participants were about 2.5 times less likely to make correct judgments than sighted participants, took longer to detect crossable gaps, and were more likely to miss crossable gaps altogether. However, the differences were significant only at the two higher volume roundabouts. In Experiment 2, we evaluated the response of drivers to pedestrians with and without mobility devices (i.e., long canes, dog guides). The experiment was conducted at a single-lane roundabout, a midblock crossing, and a two-way-stop-controlled intersection. Site-specific characteristics appeared to have a greater impact on drivers' yielding than did a mobility device. Actual or potential applications of this research include the development of methods for assessing pedestrian safety and driver behavior as well as identifying intersections that may require modification in order to be accessible to blind pedestrians.
The National Sports Education Camps Project (NSEC), a joint partnership between Western Michigan University and the United States Association of Blind Athletes, provides short-term interventions to teach sports to children with visual impairments. A study comparing 321 students with visual impairments, ranging in age from 8 to 19 years, before and after they participated in the camp found that they knew more about sports, were able to jump and throw farther, held more positive attitudes, and were more likely to become involved in local sports activities. Benefits of short-term specialized programming and implications for practice were also examined.
This study of the athlete members of the United States Association of Blind Athletes assessed the factors that affect their participation in and attitudes toward sports. Perhaps the most significant finding is the positive effect of school activities on subsequent participation in sports.
The recent explosion in the use of global positioning satellite technology has significantly increased people's ability to maintain place orientation and to store and retrieve information about specific locations, such as businesses, recreational facilities, and geographic attributes (Broida, 2004; El-Rabbany, 2002). Rather than relying on the floating bubblelike compass that once sat on the dashboard and gave a rough estimate of the direction of travel, when a person prepares for a trip to grandmother's house in 2007, he or she now may use a Global Positioning System (GPS) unit that can plan a route to grandmother's house, keep the user on route while traveling there, continually update how much farther
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