Introduction

Public officials are constantly on the lookout for ways to make the nation's roadways safer for walkers. They seek out or create new ideas in a variety of areas--engineering, enforcement, legislation, training and public education. With increasingly scarce funds, however, it is simply not possible for them to implement many of these ideas if they must be applied to an entire community.

Now, there's a better way. Just as communities can efficiently mount crime prevention programs by focusing them in high crime areas, they can also efficiently concentrate pedestrian safety improvements by carefully selecting where they are applied. To do this, they need to be able to identify small land areas (or zones ) where these improvements will reach a large number of the pedestrians whose crash risk is to be reduced.

This guide describes what zoning is and explains how to design and use pedestrian safety zones to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of pedestrian safety programs. The guide also provides a brief description of a recent pedestrian safety study that made successful use of the pedestrian safety zone process.

What is zoning?

The zone process provides a systematic method for targeting pedestrian safety improvements in a cost effective manner. Zoning identifies a subset of a jurisdiction containing as much of the pedestrian problem of interest in as little land area as possible. Specifically, it involves defining relatively small geographic areas where a relatively large proportion of the problem occurs. The aim is to achieve the highest possible efficiency , which is expressed as the ratio of the percent of the problem addressed to the percent of the land area covered. A ratio of 3 to 1 or more is the target and suggests that the zone process will yield a meaningful benefit.

Once zones are defined, pedestrian safety programs can be focused in them with greatly increased efficiency. Also, by concentrating on the zones, it is often possible to implement certain activities such as engineering improvements and distribution of giveaways (bookmarks, flyers, etc.) that would simply be too expensive to introduce on a city-wide, county-wide or other large-scale basis.

There are two main benefits of zoning:

• Efficient delivery of the program because it is carried out where a majority of the problem or the target audience exists.
  
  
• Efficient use of funds since zoning permits activities that would be prohibitively expensive if applied to an entire community.

Is zoning new?

The concept of zoning isn't really new. For years, programs for school-aged children have been applied in schools because that is where children routinely congregate and where a large number of them can be reached in an efficient and cost effective manner. In addition, over the years highway safety planners have created pin maps of crashes and other events in order to determine where the events occur and to apply improvements where they are needed. What is new is the orderly process for selecting zones in a community that is described in this guide. This process will:

• Maximize the size of the target population reached and
  
  
• Minimize the land area covered.