Abstract Manager

The City of Saint John, NB, much like most cities, is crisscrossed by a network of collector and arterial roads that were built to help move people through the City by car. While very efficient at moving vehicles, these roadways often create barriers to the movement of pedestrians due to high traffic volumes, high speeds, and wide cross-sections. The City wanted to develop a plan to prioritize crosswalk improvements throughout this network, and engaged Englobe to undertake the study.

The guiding TAC document for crosswalk infrastructure (the Pedestrian Crossing Control Guide) provides insight on how to evaluate specific locations for minimum crosswalk needs, but does not provide a framework for undertaking a network screening for crosswalk prioritization. A new procedure was developed to identify priority areas for crosswalk improvements across the City’s collector and arterial road network as a function of the risk to pedestrians in crossing the road and the estimated demand for crosswalks. Data sources used in this study included the City’s GIS platform, traffic counts, and Streetlight Data.

While the procedure developed for the City of Saint John is bespoke to the data that was available at the time of the study, the principals that were used can be readily adapted to other jurisdictions for use in their own network screening for crosswalk improvement prioritization.