VI. Local Information

Local Questionnaire

To facilitate gathering relevant information about your community and its pedestrian-related issues, a Local Data Questionnaire has been provided in Appendix A. The questionnaire deals with such topics as crash data, program activity, and community attitudes towards pedestrian issues.

You must complete this form and return it to the Instructor no later than three weeks prior to the Road Show. Failure to return the questionnaire may result in a delay in the scheduled delivery of the Road Show.

If your community has not already gathered a lot of information about the nature of your pedestrian safety problem, you may not be able to answer all of the questions on the questionnaire. That is okay. You are not expected to conduct an extensive data collection and analysis process prior to hosting the Road Show. It is important, however, that you return the questionnaire so that the Instructor will know what information you already have and what information you will need to collect early on in the development of your pedestrian safety program.

Local Slides of Local Problems/Accomplishments

During the Road Show, you will be asked to deliver a slide presentation on local facility problems (and accomplishments). You will be responsible for providing the slides for this presentation and for making the presentation (or delegating this responsibility to someone in the community who is very familiar with facility issues).

The Instructor will deliver a generic slide presentation on facility problems, using slides from all over the country. Your slide presentation on local facility problems will either replace or supplement this generic presentation, depending on the length of your presentation.

In addition, the Instructor will deliver a second slide show on some facility improvements that have been implemented in other communities. If you have already made some facility improvements, you should provide some slides on these local accomplishments as well.

Below you will find a list of suggested images to include in your presentation. The list is only offered as a suggestion. Your presentation should focus on those conditions which you believe to be of greatest significance to local pedestrians.

Problem Facility Slides

• Residential neighborhood with no sidewalks and children playing in the street
• Bus Stop at location with no sidewalk leading to or from; Bus Stop with no waiting area
• Downtown sidewalks with lots of poles, newsstands, signal boxes, trash cans, etc.
• Narrow sidewalks close to high-speed road with lots of traffic
• Broken sidewalks
• Sidewalk ending abruptly, ideally with a worn dirt path extending past sidewalk
• Very wide arterial, with no median, with people attempting to cross mid-block
• Wheelchair ramps on one side of intersection but not on other
• Wheelchair ramp that empties out into flow of traffic
• Shopping mall with no sidewalks or cross walks guiding pedestrians through parking lot
• Sidewalks crossing highway on and off ramps in such a way as to place pedestrians at risk
• Scenes of busy traffic around schools during opening or closing
• Any intersections with "no pedestrian" signs
• Commercial or industrial areas with no pedestrian access
• Bridges or underpasses with no pedestrian access

Facility Improvements

• Traffic calming measures such as speed humps or traffic roundabouts
• Re-designed sidewalks
• Re-designed intersections
• Pedestrian malls
• Pedestrian refuges
• Street furniture for pedestrians
• Well-designed pedestrian underpasses or overpasses

To be effective, the slides should be in-focus, properly lit, and not too cluttered. The problem that is being displayed should be centered in the slide.

You do not need to send the slides to the Instructor. However, you do need to send a list of the images that you will be using. The list should include a brief description of the problem that each slide portrays. This list must be provided to the Instructor two weeks before the scheduled Road Show.

Introductory Presentations

Many of the participants coming to the Road Show will be unfamiliar with exactly what has already been done for pedestrians in the community. A simple way to bring them up to speed is for representatives of key agencies to provide very brief overviews of what has been done or is being planned in their respective disciplines. These disciplines should include law enforcement, traffic engineering or planning, education, and emergency medicine. The presentations should be no more than five minutes in length, and will take place during the Introductions exercise at the opening of the Road Show.

Your responsibility as local sponsor is to make arrangements for these presentations. You need to identify individuals representing the various agencies and secure their commitment to make the presentation.

The presentation should be informal in nature and should not require a lot of advance preparation. Their primary purpose is to define where the community is with regards to pedestrian safety and where it needs to go.

Local News Clippings and Other News Reports

Early on in the Road Show, the Instructor will be conducting an exercise designed to put a human face on pedestrian crash statistics. This exercise would be greatly enhanced if you could provide information about local pedestrian crashes. Some communities accomplish this by providing copies of local news clippings about recent pedestrian crashes. You should make sufficient copies of the clippings to distribute to all participants at the Road Show. If you have invited a representative from the local newspaper, he or she may be able to conduct a search of the paper's files and provide re-prints.

While providing local clippings is not a requirement, if you are going to provide clippings during the Road Show, please provide a set to the Instructor two weeks prior to the Road Show so that he or she can build them into the presentation.

Check your local TV station - they maybe able to provide you with numerous related news "clips".

Reminder

It is important to remember that the Pedestrian Safety Road Show is designed to help communities get a pedestrian safety program started. You are not at any disadvantage if your community has not already conducted an extensive analysis of the problem and developed a detailed plan of action. In fact, if you have already done all of this, you probably are too far along to really benefit from the Road Show. The local information that is being requested here is designed to help the Instructor:

• Get a handle on where your community is in the process of developing a community program, so that the Road Show can be tailored to meet your needs, and
• Localize the information presented so that it will be more meaningful for the participants.

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