Pedestrian Flow Modeling for Prototypical Maryland Cities

Abstract

Pedestrian safety is emerging as a major area of concern for MPO's and planning agencies. Typically, pedestrian safety has been analyzed by either examining the absolute number of pedestrian crashes at a location, or computing an exposure rate from the number of crashes and the traffic volume. A more desirable measure would be an exposure rate based on the pedestrian volume, but it has not proven feasible to obtain pedestrian flow volumes on a widearea basis to support this analysis. This report describes a pedestrian flow modeling process that was developed under the sponsorship of the Maryland DOT and the University of Maryland National Center for Smart Growth. The process provides micro-scale daily pedestrian flows on all sidewalks and crosswalks in a substantial coverage area. Two test cases were analyzed: an urban scenario comprising about 10 square miles of downtown Baltimore, and a suburban scenario comprising about 15 square miles of Langley Park in Prince Georges and Montgomery Counties.