This year ends with a list of the most popular posts on the blog, written this year. Many of the most popular posts have been written in previous years, and are now perennials, but I’d like to go out of this precarious decade focusing on newer content. Obviously posts earlier in the year had a better opportunity to accumulate reads, but most articles live short lives, and get their hits quickly.
You are walking east on a footpath and come to an unmarked intersection without traffic signals. A vehicle is driving north, across your path. Who has right of way in Australia?
Should you step into the road expecting the vehicle to slow down or stop if necessary? Is the driver legally obliged to do so?
And does the driver see you? How fast is the vehicle going? Can it stop?
Now imagine you are the driver. What will the person on foot do next?
So the answer to the question of “giving way” is complicated. It depends on the speed of the car, how fast the person is walking, how quickly the driver reacts to apply the brakes, the vehicle itself, road conditions and how far the car and walker are from each other. Ideally, both the driver and walker can assess these things in a fraction of a second, but human perception and real-time calculation skills are imperfect. At higher speeds, both pedestrians and drivers underestimate vehicle speed.
Soon we will have to seriously consider autonomous vehicles, which can assess distance and speed almost perfectly, but there is still that ambiguity.
In Australia, the National Transport Commission recommends model rules, which each state adopts and lightly modifies. For instance, New South Wales Road Rules 72, 73 and 353 cover pedestrians crossing a road.
If a driver who is turning from a road at an intersection is required to give way to a pedestrian who is crossing the road that the driver is entering, the driver is only required to give way to the pedestrian if the pedestrian’s line of travel in crossing the road is essentially perpendicular to the edges of the road the driver is entering – the driver is not required to give way to a pedestrian who is crossing the road the driver is leaving.
Because of the legal principle of duty of care, drivers must still try to avoid colliding with pedestrians. They have a legal obligation to not be negligent. Thus, they must stop if they can for pedestrians who are already there, but not those on the side of the road wanting to cross.
However, this element of the NSW Road Transport Act is not made explicit in the NSW Road Rules. There is no statutory requirement in the road rules or elsewhere to give way to pedestrians other than as set out specifically in the road rules.
In contrast, NSW Road Rules 230 and 236 explicitly require pedestrians to avoid behaving dangerously around cars.
Drivers must always give way to pedestrians if there is danger of colliding with them, however pedestrians should not rely on this and should take great care when crossing any road.
Does a slow-moving person’s higher risk of being hit mean they can’t cross the road?Shutterstock
This statement is not supported by any road rule or other law.
Does the law as written mean a slow-moving person can never cross the street because of the risk of being hit? Only because duty-of-care logic indicates both the driver and pedestrian should yield to the other to avoid a collision is it possible for this person to cross without depending on the kindness of strangers. But the law gives the benefit of doubt to the driver of the multi-ton machine. Existing road rules permit drivers to voluntarily give way, or not.
Keep in mind the asymmetry of this situation. A person walking into the side of the car is silly. A car being driven into the side of a person, as happens 1,500 times a year in NSW, is life-threatening.
The UK Manual for Streets presents a street user hierarchy that puts pedestrians at the top. That is, their needs and safety should be considered first.
Walking has multiple benefits. More people on foot lowers infrastructure costs, improves health and reduces the number in cars, in turn reducing crashes, pollution and congestion. However, the road rules are not designed with this logic.
The putative aim of road rules is safety, but in practice the rules trade off between safety and convenience. The more rules are biased toward the convenience of drivers, the more drivers there will be.
Yet public policy aims to promote walking. To do so, pedestrians should be given freer rein to walk: alert, but not afraid.
Like many things in this world, intersection interactions are negotiated, tacitly, by road users and their subtle and not-so-subtle cues. Pedestrians should have legal priority behind them in this negotiation.
The road rules need to be amended to require drivers to give way to pedestrians at all intersections. We favour a rule requiring drivers to look out for pedestrians and give way to them on any road or road-related area. In the case of collisions, the onus would be on drivers to show they could not in the circumstances give way to the pedestrian.
We believe all intersections without signals – whether marked, courtesy, or unmarked – be legally treated as marked pedestrian crossings. (It might help to mark them to remind drivers of this.) We should think of these intersections as spaces where vehicles cross an implicit continuous footpath, rather than as places where people cross a vehicular lane.
At this intersection in Surry Hills, NSW, vehicles cross a continuous footpath.Photo by David Levinson., Author provided
This change in perspective will require significant road user re-education. Users will have to be reminded every intersection is a crosswalk and that pedestrians both in the road and showing intent to cross should be yielded to, whether the vehicle is entering or exiting the road. We believe this change will increase safety and willingness to walk, because of the safety-in-numbers phenomenon, and improve quality of life.
In Minnesota, every corner is a crosswalk, marked or not, so stopping for pedestrians at intersections is mandatory, whatever direction the car is moving.Minnesota Department of Transportation., Author provided
Drivers should assume more responsibility for safety
People should continue to behave in a way that does not harm themselves or others. People on foot should not jump out in front of cars, expecting drivers to slam on their brakes, because drivers cannot always stop in time.
Similarly, drivers should be ready to slow or stop when a person crosses the street, at a crosswalk or not. But the law should be refactored to give priority to pedestrians at unmarked crossings. This will reduce ambiguity and make drivers more alert and ready to slow down.
In tomorrow’s world of driverless and passengerless vehicles, the convenience of drivers becomes even less essential. If someone is crossing the road, most of us probably believe a driverless vehicle should give way to ensure it doesn’t hit that person for two reasons: legally, to avoid being negligent; and morally, because hitting people is bad, as identified in many examples of the Trolley Problem.
Further, we should think more like the Netherlands, where vehicle-pedestrian collisions are presumed to be the driver’s fault, unless it can be clearly proven otherwise.
This article examined a few of 353 distinct road rules. Many others affect pedestrians and should also be re-examined.
This article was extensively edited by Janet Wahlquist of WalkSydneyand extends some ideas developed as part of Betty Yang’s undergraduate thesis, but the text is the sole responsibility of the author.
I recently received the following from an Elsevier editor at a prominent journal.
Dear Prof. Levinson, I am writing to ask you to reconsider your decision to decline the invitation to review the above paper. As an author who has a paper submitted to Transportation Research Part A, you should know how important is it to have good and prompt reviews. This is possible only if reviewers accept the invitation to review papers. As a very experienced past editor in chief told me once “if you wish your paper to be reviewed, you need to do your share for the journal”. I believe this is a fair comment. Hope you can reconsider your decision. Best wishes,
Elsevier and the quid pro quo.
It would be a shame if you ever submit to this journal again, the editors might not look favourably.
I have edited, for free, i.e. engaged in unpaid labour, for Elsevier’s Transportation Research part A 31 times according to my incomplete records. I have published in this same journal 15 times over the course of my career, usually with coauthors, providing free content which Elsevier resells.
I think I have done my “share” for the journal, owned by one of the most profitable companies in the world.. But sure, if that’s how they want to play it, I am done. I am out. No more Transportation Research part A submissions from me. I won’t stand for this kind of guilt-tripping combined with implicit threat, this distorted version of ‘pay to play’. The editors of the other Transportation Research parts have never been quite so blatant about demanding this for that. I said “no,” that should have been the end of it.
To be clear, when a reviewer declines a new paper to review, the editor can ask nicely again if they need to. It is even more important on the second round. As an editor and founder of two open access journals: Journal of Transport and Land Use and Transport Findings, I know finding responsive reviewers can be difficult. I wish there were more open access journals in transport, so we could spread the wealth.
But I also know what I don’t know. I don’t know the other demands on the reviewers time. I don’t know whether they have sick or disabled family members at home, have a book coming out, face project or proposal deadlines, are recovering from earthquakes or natural disasters, have retired, are physically ill, have a conflict of interest with the paper, or are reviewing for 100 other journals, or anything else.
The Committee of the Transport Accessibility Manual will meet at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC in January:
Transport Accessibility Manual Working Group (SAM20-0007 AP050)
Tuesday, Jan 14, 2020 8:00AM – 9:45AM (US Eastern Standard Time)
We will be discussing the first (preliminary) draft of the document, which will be distributed to mailing list members before the meeting. Contact me directly if you would like to be added to the mailing list.
Talks and Conferences
I will be in Wellington, New Zealand for two presentations:
Cui, Mengying, and Levinson, D. (2020) Shortest paths, travel costs, and traffic. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.
Davis, Blake, Ji, Ang, Liu, Bichen, and Levinson, D. (2020) Moving Array Traffic Probes. To be presented at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting, January 2020.
Visualizations to teach intro topics for transportation engineering by University of Illinois at Urban Champaign professor Lewis Lehe https://cee310.com/
The Committee of the Transport Accessibility Manual will meet at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington DC in January:
Transport Accessibility Manual Working Group (SAM20-0007 AP050)
Tuesday, Jan 14, 2020 8:00AM 9:45AM (US Eastern Standard Time)
We will be discussing the first (preliminary) draft of the document, which will be distributed to mailing list members before the meeting. Contact me directly if you would like to be added to the mailing list.
Join our panel at Sydney University at 4:30-6:30 pm on Wednesday 27th of November for a discussion on the future of public transport infrastructure funding. Please RSVP.
Gunzel (n) A railway or tram enthusiast; particularly (formerly derogatory) one who is overly enthusiastic or foolish. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gunzel
There are many new posts on the site, from the organisation where I now preside. You should check WalkSydney out, and if you are in Greater Sydney, you should join.
I attended COTA International Conference of Transport Professionals in Nanjing (and a pre-conference in Beijing). It’s a good event, and obviously, there is a lot of action in transport in China. I presented on the End of Traffic and the Future of Access, and a General Theory of Access.
Papers by Us
Carrion, Carlos and David Levinson (2019) Overestimation and underestimation of travel time on commute trips: GPS vs. self- reporting. Urban Science. 3(3), 70 [doi]
Cui, Mengying and Levinson, D. (2019) Primal and Dual Access. Geographical Analysis. (accepted and in press) [doi]
My friends at GoGet, an Australian CarSharing company, released the report “Let’s Fix Congestion!”. While I am allergic to the congestion framing, since obviously cities should be designed around accessibility, it is widely believed to be necessary to talk about congestion to get broader buy in from the media for any transport issue around here.
Remode Reprice Reshape
The strategy in the report is quite sound for a soundbyte: Remode, reprice, reshape. Quoting from the report:
Remoding
Remoding is a strategy that shifts more people out of the dominant mode, the private vehicle, into other modes such as public transport, active transport, and shared mobility. This latter area includes on-demand sharing, an approach that can offer compelling convenience and affordability for the transport consumer.
…
Repricing
We need to address the economic and taxation policies that have preferenced the private car over other transport modes, and in turn generate congestion.
Currently the true cost of using a private vehicle is kept from the consumer’s view, whether it involves not accurately pricing parking or congestion’s effect on productivity.
…
Reshaping
Our cities have been designed around the private vehicle, preferencing space for cars over space for people.
We need to re-imagine our built environments and associated land use policies. Density is not a bad word if it is density done right. Density done right means an abundance of local shops and services which encourage abundant local living. Local living encourages local transport, often active, public and shared, and disincentivises the private vehicle, particularly when combined with smart parking policies.
This slogan is of course is adapted from the environmental movement’s Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, part of the Waste Hierarchy. [Replace and Recover and sometimes added to this list.]
But did you know Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal strategy was “Relief, Recovery, and Reform”? The Three Rs have a long history.
We at TransportLab consider ourselves capable people. Our capability statement shows some of what we have on offer. If you are interested in pursuing research, please contact us.
Capability Statement – Transport Engineering (page 1 of 2)Capability Statement – Transport Engineering (page 2 of 2)
Our TransportLab research group will be at the Transportation Research Board Conference in Washington, DC, in January. Our papers and sessions include:
Monday 01:30 PM- 05:30 PMMarriott Marquis, Independence Salon C (M4)
Wu, Hao, El-Geneidy, Ahmed, Stewart, Anson, Murphy, Brendan, Boisjoly, Genevieve, Niedzielski, Michał , Pereira, Rafael H.M., and Levinson, D. (2020) Access Across the Globe: Towards an International Comparison of Cumulative Opportunities
David Levinson, Transportist 
You must be logged in to post a comment.