Child-Pedestrian Traffic Safety at Crosswalks—Literature Review

Abstract

Child pedestrians make up 30% of the total number of children injured in road traffic in the EU. They are a particularly vulnerable subgroup because they exhibit specific traffic behavior related to cognitive and physical development, sociodemographic characteristics, and environmental conditions. This paper provides an overview of research of parameters that affect the safety of children in the conflict zones of the intersection—crosswalks. The overview was undertaken targeting available research mostly conducted in the last 10 years all over the world, related to the identification of parameters that affect the safety of child-pedestrians, and models developed for the prediction of pedestrian and child-pedestrian behavior. Research conducted on various urban networks provides insight into locally and more widely applicable impact parameters connected to child characteristics and infrastructural and traffic elements, but also distractors (e.g., electronic devices) as new phenomena influencing children’s road safety. A review of pedestrian behavior-prediction models suggests that models are being developed for the general population, and models for children’s behavior, with specific parameters, are missing. For further research, more detailed analysis of the impact of distractors and of COVID–19 pandemic non-mobility, as well as an analysis of possible infrastructural solutions to increase children’s road traffic safety, is suggested.