Date of Award

Fall 2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Psychology

Committee Director

Bryan E. Porter

Committee Member

Abby L. Braitman

Committee Member

Michelle L. Kelley

Abstract

The increasing trend in pedestrian-motorist incidents on American roadways warrants a novel solution for improving roadway safety. Alternative crosswalk designs have piqued communities both in the United States and abroad. Designs range from slight changes in colors to extravagant illusions of the roadway falling beneath users. These crosswalk designs are not novel, literature on their efficacy as safety infrastructure is modest with mixed results. The purpose of the study was to expand the current literature on alternative crosswalk designs. The author hypothesized that the differences in behavioral intentions at alternative and standard safety infrastructure would be greater for younger male road users and these differences would diminish as road users got older. This study aimed to answer these questions by examining the relationship between behavioral intentions for pedestrians (going out of the way and walking a minute or more out of their way) and motorists (yielding for pedestrians) using three different crosswalk designs (continental, color aditivo, and colorful 3-dimensional). An online survey recruited 525 participants. Three well-known measures were used as covariates: the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR), the Pedestrian Behavioral Questionnaire (PBQ), and the Driver Behavioral Questionnaire (DBQ). There were three major findings. Respondents had higher intentions of going out of the way and yielding at standard and 3-dimensional crosswalk designs compared to color aditivo designs (Cruz-Diez, 2024). This finding could be attributed to participants not recognizing color aditivo designs as crosswalks and could suggest that color changes to crosswalk designs should be consistent with existing road marking colors (e.g., primarily white, with yellow or red) and not varying color hues (i.e., greens and blues). Male’s age appeared to be a stronger predictor for intentions to yield, whereas, for females, age predicted intentions to go out of the way to cross traffic at all crosswalk designs. That is, older male motorists had higher intentions to yield. Similarly, as females got older, they had higher intentions to walk out of the way to use a crosswalk. Finally, for motorists the covariates for social desirability (BIDR) and intentional unsafe behaviors (DBQ) contributed medium to large effects in most analysis.

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DOI

10.25777/gr6r-5762

ISBN

9798302861504

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