Proposed Pedestrian Crosswalk Safety Rating for Mexico City

Objective. Propose a pedestrian crosswalk safety rating (PCSR) for primary roads in Mexico City in order to rate crosswalk safety at intersections with a traffic light and then compare the PCSR with traffic accidents so as to empirically determine any association between the quality of the crosswalk and the traffic accident rate. Methods. Identify criteria for the rating system through a state-of-the art review; weight the criteria to create a rating system through multicriterion analysis; design a stratified random sample of crosswalks (n = 490); and evaluate the data set. Results. Through the PCSR, 91.3% of the crosswalks evaluated in Mexico City were found not to offer the conditions required to protect pedestrian safety; the "access" macro-criterion received the worst scores. The modelling shows that mixed land use and the length of the crosswalk are the most important variables in predicting traffic accidents. Conclusions. The analysis was relatively successful in showing the relationship between some variables (criteria) of the PCSR and traffic accidents. in many cases, this shows theoretical coherence; in others, research questions are raised.