Pedestrian accessibility and safety around bus stops in Delhi

Safety for public transport (PT) users is least during the access and egress trips. Previous studies have established that improvement in pedestrian safety will improve the safety of PT users as well. We studied the accessibility of pedestrian infrastructure around ~360 sampled bus stops in Delhi by conducting physical audits. 15 indicators in the audit checklist were meaningfully reduced to five factors through Principal Components Analysis. We developed Poisson regression models (with their geographically-weighted counterparts) to assess the association between these five factors for each bus stop with the number of pedestrian fatalities around that stop. Two models were developed— a) for fatalities where the impacting vehicle was known, and b) for fatalities where the impacting vehicle was unknown (hit-and-run cases). For both the models, geographically-weighted Poisson regression (GWPR) performed better than their global Poisson counterparts. Overall improved access was seen to be positively associated with less pedestrian fatalities. Further, we established that the nature of hit-and-run cases differ from those where the impacting vehicle is known, through— a) difference in the effect of the exposure variable, b) different factors being significant in the respective models, especially in the GWPR. The novelty of this study is that we modelled the relationship of pedestrian fatalities around PT stops with factors related to the pedestrian access to these stops. Through the application of GWPR, we found that different types of pedestrian fatalities are related to different aspects of access. We also identified bus stops with higher risk of pedestrian fatalities. Based on this, the methodology presented in this study is useful in guiding city authorities to identify and prioritise a) specific access-related factors which require improvement, and b) bus stops which require improvement in their pedestrian-access infrastructure. These analyses can be extended to study pedestrian safety around PT stops in any city.