Abstract
New York City has implemented a suite of interventions to reduce road traffic crashes, including leading pedestrian intervals (LPIs), which give pedestrians a head start over the turning vehicular traffic. This study assessed the effectiveness of LPIs in reducing pedestrian injuries across 6,003 intersections (2,869 with LPI treatment) from 2013 to 2018. They conclude that LPIs are an effective intervention to improve pedestrian safety.
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Data availability
Data used in this study are publicly available at NYC Open Data and the generated data are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15377024 (ref. 15). The NYC Open Data Motor Vehicle Collisions—Crashes file (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Public-Safety/Motor-Vehicle-Collisions-Crashes/h9gi-nx95) provided day-by-day incident-level data for all motor vehicle crashes since 2012. The website also provided data on roadway segments used for building the effect measure modifier dataset (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Centerline/3mf9-qshr). The NYC Vision Zero website provided data on LPI locations and installation dates (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Transportation/VZV_Leading-Pedestrian-Interval-Signals/mqt5-ctec) and those for turn-traffic-calming measures (https://data.cityofnewyork.us/Transportation/VZV_Turn-Traffic-Calming/hz4p-9f7s).
Code availability
The STATA and R code used in this article are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15377024 (ref. 15).
References
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The City of New York. Mayor Adams Announces Historic Investment Of More Than $900 Million in Traffic Safety to Turn the Tide on Traffic Violence Crisis http://nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/243-22/mayor-adams-historic-investment-more-900-million-traffic-safety-turn-the#/0 (2022).
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Zadey, S. et al. Data and code for effectiveness of leading pedestrian intervals for pedestrian safety in New York City. Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15377024 (2025).
Acknowledgements
We thank L. C. Houghton, A. Furuya, M. Thimm-Kaiser, M. L. Lui and N. Buttar for their helpful feedback. Research reported here was supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) National Center for Injury Prevention and Control’s Injury Control Research Center Grant R49CE003094. E.L.E. is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute on Drug Abuse grant T32DA031099. S.Z. is supported by the SOPHE/CDC Student Fellowship in Injury Prevention (2024–2025). The findings and conclusions in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the CDC or NIH.
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Contributions
S.Z. and C.N.M. conceptualized the study. S.Z. conducted the formal data analysis and visualization, and drafted the original manuscript. S.Z. and L.E.R. contributed to the data curation. S.Z., L.E.R., C.N.M. and D.E.G. contributed to the methodology. L.E.R. and B.B. provided administrative support. C.N.M. supervised the project and acquired funding. All other authors critically reviewed and edited the manuscript.
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Competing interests
S.Z. is a co-founding director of the Association for Socially Applicable Research (ASAR). He represents ASAR as the G4 Alliance Permanent Council Member and serves as the Chair of the SOTA Care in Asia Working Group, The G4 Alliance. He is also a Drafting Committee Member for Maharashtra State Mental Health Policy and a Fellow of the Lancet Citizens’ Commission on Reimagining India’s Health System. Unrelated to the work presented in this article, he has affiliate/adjunct appointments at Duke GEMINI Research Center and Dr. D. Y. Patil University. The other authors declare no competing interests.
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Nature Cities thanks Julius Uhlmann and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Figs. 1 and 2, Tables 1–3, Box 1, Methods and references.
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Zadey, S., Roberts, L.E., Bushover, B. et al. Effectiveness of leading pedestrian intervals for city walkers’ safety. Nat Cities 2, 608–612 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00267-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00267-1
