Hazardous Bus Stops Identification: An Illustration Using GIS

Abstract

Safety and accessibility to bus transit systems play a vital role in increasing transit market potential. Bus passengers often tend to cross the streets from either behind or in front of the bus as crosswalks do not exist near most bus stops, which are typically away from intersections. These unsafe maneuvers frequently result in either auto-pedestrian collisions or conflicts. Identifying hazardous bus stops would serve as a building block to study the causal factors, select mitigation strategies, and allocate safety funds to improve bus passenger safety. The focus of this article is to develop a Geographic Information Systems (GIS) based methodology to assist decisionmakers in identifying and ranking bus stops in high auto-pedestrian collision concentration areas. The working of the GIS-based methodology is illustrated using 2000–2002 auto-pedestrian collision data, traffic volumes, bus stop coverage, transit ridership data, and street centerline coverage for the Las Vegas Metro area. Results obtained are sensitive to buffer radius and ranking methods used to rank hazardous bus stops. Potential strategies and countermeasures to enhance safety at hazardous bus stops are also discussed.