Bicyclists and pedestrians are among the most vulnerable users of our transportation system. Understanding their behaviors and interactions can help communities improve their policies, infrastructure, educational programming, and other safety-related factors.
We have extensive experience conducting naturalistic biking studies, with both children and adults, to examine their experiences navigating the community. We also analyze crash patterns to better understand and predict how they impact bicycle and pedestrian mobility and decision-making.
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Parent-Child Pedestrian Roadway Crossing
Collisions with motor vehicles are a major cause of death and disability for child pedestrians. In 2020 alone, collisions with vehicles resulted in 177 deaths and 5,223 injuries involving child pedestrians ages 14 years and younger (NCSA, 2022). Parents play a critical role in teaching children how to safely navigate traffic, yet virtually nothing is known about how parents and children interact when crossing roads together. The goal of this project is to develop and use a wearable pedestrian instrumentation system to study parent-child interactions during naturalistic road crossing. Similar to systems used in the TRIPS Lab to study bicycling safety, this study uses head-mounted DJI cameras that parents and children wear while taking walks together in the natural environment. This allows us to record what parents and children see, hear, and say while crossing roads together. The long-term goal of the project is to improve childhood pedestrian safety by developing a parent-based intervention for teaching children how to cross roads safely. As the study progresses, more information can be found through the Hank Virtual Environments Lab.
This study is funded by the University of Iowa Injury Prevention Research Center (IPRC).
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