Psychological Science: On average, a pedestrian in the US is killed in a car-related
accident every 2 hours and injured every 7 minutes, according to data
from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But children
aren’t the ones at greatest risk of a deadly collision with a car–
seniors are. A CDC analysis of pedestrian traffic deaths from 2001-2010 concluded
that the risk of death actually increases with age. Children under age
15 had the lowest risk of dying as the result of a collision with a
vehicle; people over the age of 75 were more than twice as likely to be
killed by a car compared to pedestrians overall.
To find out more about pedestrian decision-making as people age, a
team led by psychological scientist Aurélie Dommes of the French
Institute of Science and Technology for Transport (IFSTTAR) built a
realistic street-crossing simulator in the lab.
A large-scale projection system on two walls showed a two-way street
with oncoming cars approaching from both directions at varied speeds.
Just like a real crossing, participants had to look both ways in order
to gauge whether they had enough time to make it across the street
without a collision.
The researchers tested a total of 84 participants from three age
groups in the simulator: young adults ages 19 to 35, older adults ages
62 to 71, and seniors 72 to 85 years old. Participants’ head motion as
they checked for traffic, their decision to cross, and their walking
speed were recorded for each crossing.
As expected, the oldest participants were significantly more likely
than the other groups to misjudge oncoming traffic, resulting in a
“collision” with an oncoming car.
Older pedestrians tended to pay more attention to the lane close to
them, while ignoring the traffic in the far lane. In contrast, younger
pedestrians were better able to focus on both lanes of traffic before
deciding whether or not to cross the street. In addition, seniors had
more difficulty than younger pedestrians compensating for an unsafe
crossing decision by walking faster.
Dommes and colleagues suspect that age-related declines in perceptual
and cognitive functioning make it difficult for seniors to fully
process both lanes of traffic. As a result, older pedestrians focus too
much on the distance of the cars nearby without properly accounting for
the distance and speed of cars in the far lane.
“Because sensorimotor performance becomes cognitively more demanding
with advancing age, the control of posture and gait while walking could
also contribute to the too high attentional requirements of the two-way
street-crossing task for old[er] pedestrians, who suffer from limited
attentional resources,” Dommes and colleagues write in the Journal of Safety Research.
This age effect is also in line with the French crash statistics
indicating that people over 75 make up the most vulnerable pedestrian
group, accounting for more than 37% of fatalities despite representing
less than 9% of the population.
To cut down on pedestrian fatalities, cities can increase the number
of marked street crossings and make crossing times longer at busy
intersections. Including more traffic islands can also help lighten the
cognitive load of crossing a busy street by splitting the task into two
stages.