To what extent can ITS improve pedestrian mobility and safety: Main focus children

A sustainable urban environment may have a focus on how to provide food, clean water, clean air, and energy to a growing urban population. However, an undoubtedly important aspect of sustainability is how to provide for transportation of people and freight. A sustainable urban environment will need to rely less on private automobiles and more on walking, bicycling and public transportation. In addition, public transportation cannot take people from door to door, so public transportation trips include walking or bicycling components as well. We will not move towards a more sustainable society unless we accept that children are people with transportation needs, and ‘bussing’ them around, or providing parental limousine services at all times, will not lead to sustainability. Rather, we will need to make our cities walkable for children, at least above a certain age. But today, many parents feel that their cities are not safe even for their 15 year old children. Safety has two main aspects, traffic safety and personal safety (risk of assault). Besides being safe, children will also need an urban environment with reasonable mobility, where they themselves can reach destinations with reasonable effort; else they will still need to be driven. This paper analyses and compiles several ways that Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) can aid pedestrians, especially children. Different uses and possibilities for improving the mobility and safety of pedestrians in urban spaces are explored and classified into groups by function. Apart from a comprehensive literature review, this paper presents results from expert questionnaires focusing on the potential safety and mobility benefits to child pedestrians of targeted types of ITS. Based on a first questionnaire, where 20 experts participated, fifteen areas of interest (problem areas) were defined. A second questionnaire was used to rank the problem areas by importance. Full responses were received from 23 European, North American and Israeli experts. This paper focuses on six of the problem areas and potential safety and mobility benefits of different ITS aids. One aspect of the paper is how technology can be used to guide people away from dangerous streets and crossing points (traffic safety) and away from dangerous neighborhoods (personal safety). But the paper also discusses how we can use technology to make drivers notice that there are children nearby, and how to reduce vehicle speeds so that children and automobiles can share the same space. Other aspects covered are how technology can be used to take over where drivers fail, and to warn child pedestrians when someone runs a red light or commits another infraction.