Crosswalks can put elderly in harm’s way

Marked crosswalks with no traffic signals or stop signs may give elderly pedestrians a false sense of security -- especially when compared with other types of intersections.

True, motorists are supposed to stop when a person steps into a crosswalk, but the reality is many don’t. A study of 282 crosswalk injuries in six cities -- in Long Beach and West Los Angeles and four cities in Washington -- found that elderly people were three times as likely to be hit by a vehicle when crossing a street in a marked crosswalk (but with no signal or sign) than if that same intersection had an unmarked crosswalk.

There was almost no difference in the risk of injury between marked and unmarked crosswalks as long as some type of traffic control was present.

“I was struck by how difficult it is to cross the street when you’re an older person. Some research has shown that they need more time to cross, then they hesitate before they cross, which gives them even less time,” says Dr. Thomas B. Cole, co-author of the editorial accompanying the study and associate professor of social medicine and epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Instead of getting rid of crosswalks, we need to make them safer.”

Journal of the American Medical Assn., Nov. 6, 2002