In total, 564 community members completed the pedestrian safety survey, 275 lived from Minneapolis and 214 from Saint Paul. Participant ages ranged from 18 to 85 or older, with female, male and non-binary responders within each city as well.
As a whole, both pedestrians and drivers find themselves at crosswalks more regularly in Minneapolis than those in Saint Paul. A majority of responders form Minneapolis find themselves as pedestrians or drivers at crosswalks on a daily basis, while the majority responders from Saint Paul found themselves at crosswalks on a yearly basis.
In general, drivers in both cities tend to feel more unsafe at unmarked crosswalks with no traffic signal present. When a traffic signal is introduced at these unmarked crosswalks participants tend to feel marginally safer. Participants feel the most save at controlled intersection with marked crosswalk.
As a whole, pedestrian responders to the survey within the Twin Cities share similar levels of safety at the various crosswalk types as drivers. Similar to Twin Cities drivers, pedestrians find themselves the safest at crosswalks that are both marked and controlled by a traffic signal. Similarly, pedestrians also rated uncontrolled marked crosswalks less safe relative to traffic controlled marked crosswalks and unmarked uncontrolled crosswalks the most unsafe.
The final portion of the survey focused on the publics knowledge of pedestrian safety laws as well as their thoughts on pedestrian safety law enforcement. When it comes to what drivers are required to do when approaching a pedestrian in a crosswalk, a majority of responders were confident in their knowledge of the law; however, when asked to describe the law only ~65% of responders directly included the word “stop” in their response. The overall understanding of the law requires pedestrians do at a crosswalk was much lower. When asked what pedestrians must do, a majority of responders still said yes; however, more responders chose unsure or no. The most common response when asked what the law requires, were responses including some form of “look both ways”.
When surveyed about overall enforcement of pedestrian safety laws, it appears that responders do not believe these laws are being enforced very strictly. When asked to rate how strictly the laws are enforced, a majority of responders leaned towards “rarely”, “not at all”, and “not very strictly”. When asked if they had seen special law enforcement near crosswalks enforcement pedestrian safety laws, an overwhelming majority said no (94.79%).
