Main Findings of The Follow-Up Survey : GRSI Beijing Project of Improving Vulnerable Road User Safety at Intersections

The 2004-2005 road crash data of Beijing Traffic Management Bureau indicated that over 50 percent of the road crashes in the city occurred at intersections and vulnerable road users were involved in 43. During 2006-2009 a pilot project to improve the vulnerable road users (VRU) safety at the six selected high risk intersections in Beijing were carried out. A follow up survey was carried out one year after the completion of the pilot project in 2010 to review the traffic and safety situation at the six selected intersections. The purpose of the survey was to find out: a) whether the countermeasures/facilities taken in the project still were in place and whether people still used them; b) if the countermeasures helped to reduce the number of road crashes. The survey applied the following approaches: a) the 2008-2009 road crash data in Beijing was collected from the local traffic police and analyzed; b) road observations was conducted at the six selected intersections to collect the traffic information such as traffic volume, vehicle speed, traffic timing and traffic conflicts; c) the questionnaire survey was conducted at the intersections to understand the behaviours of different road users when crossing the six improved intersections. The findings of the survey show that the casualty cashes were reduced at all of the six intersections compared with the data before the pilot program during 2004-2005; most of the countermeasures used in the pilot project are still in place and still being used by people; though some of them were converted into different form or moved to other places (such as the some road signs were moved from the roadside barrier to median barrier) when the road maintenance was conducted. This paper provides the general information of the pilot project, the background and method used in the follow-up survey; and using two of the six intersections as the example to show the problems at the intersections, the countermeasures used to address the issues, and the data comparison at the three different ...