The Safety of Pedestrian and Bicycle Travel in Minnesota

Project summary:

MnDOT and the Minnesota Department of Safety are currently leading an initiative known as "Toward Zero Deaths" to reduce the number of traffic fatalities in the state. A key part of this initiative is to have a better understanding of bicycle- and pedestrian-related accidents and crashes.

This report examines the information that is collected regarding pedestrian and bicycle crashes in Minnesota in comparison to other states, and looks at new ways in which this data can be used increase knowledge of pedestrian and bicycle crashes. To do this exploits a database of crash report information for all pedestrian and bicycle crashes in the State of Minnesota from 1998-2002. This analysis examines general trends of pedestrian and bicycle crashes. In addition, it demonstrates that pedestrian crashes tend to occur in different locations than bicycle crashes. The final part of the report focuses on developing a method to identify where pedestrian and bicycle crashes are more likely to occur, Poisson regression to identify the relationships between crashes, and neighborhood attributes.