Distracted Pedestrian Behavior on two Urban College Campuses

Abstract

Pedestrian injuries injure about 180,000 individuals and kill 6000 each year in the United States, and pedestrian injury rates have increased each of the last several years. Distracted pedestrian behavior may play a role in the trend of increasing risk for pedestrian injury. Using in vivo behavioral coding over the course of two weeks on two urban college campuses, this study aimed to (1) understand the type and rate of distractions engaged in by pedestrians on urban college campuses, and (2) investigate the impact of distraction on street-crossing safety and behavior. A total of 10,543 pedestrians were observed, 90% of them young adults. Over one-third of those pedestrians were distracted while actively crossing roadways. Headphones were the most common distraction (19% of all pedestrians), followed by text-messaging (8%) and talking on the phone (5%). Women were more likely to text and talk on the phone than men, and men were more likely to be wearing headphones. Distracted pedestrians were somewhat less likely to look for traffic when they entered roadways. As handheld device usage continues to increase, behavioral interventions should be developed and implemented. Changes to policy concerning distracted pedestrian behavior, including improvement of the built environment to reduce pedestrian risk, should be considered in busy pedestrian areas like urban college campuses.

Adolescents’ Mobile Phone Use While Crossing the Road

“…Mobile phones and other portable digital devices distracted adolescents' looking behaviour at the roadside, especially when visual attention to the device was required. This supports previous observations of adults and young people [12], as well as the results of pedestrian simulator studies [28]. The detrimental effects of visual distractions (looking, texting and swiping behaviours) compared to auditory distractions (listening, using headphones) supports the results of previous research on visual and auditory distractions among young people [29].…”

“…However, the rates of unsafe pedestrian behaviour in relation to technology use were similar for males and females. This does not support the gender differences noted in field studies of adult pedestrian behaviour [9][10][11][12].…”

“…For example, rates of injuries specifically due to pedestrians' mobile phone use increased steadily from 0.36% in 2005 to 3.67% in 2010 [8], indicating that rates multiplied by ten in only five years. Field studies of pedestrian behaviour in several countries (e.g., Australia, Serbia, USA) have found that pedestrians who were texting or talking on a phone looked for traffic less frequently than non-users and this occurred more frequently among women than men [9][10][11][12]. Studies using an immersive laboratory road-crossing simulation found that pedestrians walked slower when talking on a mobile phone [13], paid less attention to traffic, allowed less time to cross before an oncoming vehicle and had more road traffic hits and near misses when using a mobile phone [14][15][16].…”

Extent of mobile phone use by pedestrians on controlled crossings in central Hobart, Tasmania

“…Of the 886, 5.7% were distracted by phones (Bungum et al, 2005). A study of two American college campuses found 8% reading or typing, 5% talking on the phone and 19% listening via headphones (Wells et al, 2018). A study of self-reported pedestrian crash history among US teenagers (13 to 18 years) found that 30% reported having been hit, or almost hit, by a car, cyclist, or motorcyclist while walking and 71% reported using of a device when walking 'all of the time', 'often' or 'sometimes' (Rosenthal et al 2016).…”

The hazards of pedestrian mobile-phone use when crossing signalized intersections, Iran (2017); an observational study

“…In the study by Hatfield & Murphy (2007), they concluded that caution behavior was less common in men than in women, with this difference having been significant at signalized intersections for some passing behaviors, such as crossing the pedestrian signal, looking at the traffic while crossing, completing crossing at the marked pedestrian crossing, and conflict experiences (17). A large number of studies also indicate that men tend to show more risky behavior than women (7,24,26,27). Antic et al (2016) reported that men had a 4.1-time higher chance of showing at least one case of unsafe behavior when crossing the street than women (15).…”