Abstract
Within the past decade there has been an increase in pedestrian deaths and reports of injuries that result in an emergency room visit. Distractions can take away from the cognitive effort needed to focus on safely crossing roadways as a pedestrian. Pedestrians using cell phones significantly presented more unsafe behaviors than iPod users and non-users. Last year at VSS we showed that there were few differences in safety behaviors when comparing pedestrians using their phones and using their headphones to non-users. Only a small number of people were distracted when crossing (24%). We extended this work to examine the number of safety behaviors demonstrated for different crossing locations, gender and phone use. Pedestrians (N=265) were observed as they crossed at three different locations on our campus. Experimenters recorded gender, phone use and particular safety behaviors: pressing the signal button, looking both ways before crossing, waiting for traffic to stop, looking at traffic during the walk and staying within the zebra stripes. After examining the average number of safety behaviors each person exhibited, there was a trend for females (M=3.19, SD=1.12) to use more safety behaviors compared to males (M=2.93, SD=1.18; t(263)=1.78, p=.076) but no differences between phone users (M=3.16, SD=1.03) and non-phone users (M=2.99, SD=1.20; t(263)=.97, p=.33). Each location contained a different kind of crosswalk signal; two contained an immediate press-to-walk signal (one within a traffic circle (M=2.93, SD=1.24) and one on a straight road (M=3.20, SD=1.03)), the third was a typical delayed press-to-walk signal where traffic will get a red light (M=2.94, SD=1.20). Again, each group displayed similar average number of safety behaviors while crossing (F(2,262)=1.68, p=.188. The pedestrian observed were using “safe enough” behaviors as they crossed the road and did not show signs of distractions detrimentally affecting their safety while crossing on a college campus.