The book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt, goes into a lot of detail about driving behavior. While it mostly covers motor vehicle traffic, it talks about a few things that may be of interest to people on foot.
It spends some time talking about Dutch woonerven where people on foot and on bicycles share the space with people in cars, creating a calmer and safer environment than typical roadways for everyone.
It also provides some insight into crosswalks, showing that unmarked crosswalks may actually be safer for pedestrians:
Studies do show that motorists are more likely to yield to pedestrians in marked crosswalks than at unmarked crosswalks. But as University of California – Berkeley researchers David Ragland and Meghan Fehlig Mitman found, that does not necessarily make things safer. When they compared the way pedestrians crossed at both kinds of crosswalks on roads with considerable traffic volumes, they found that people at unmarked crosswalks tended to look both ways more often, waited more often for gaps in traffic, and crossed the road more quickly. Researchers suepect that both drivers and pedestrians are more aware that drivers should yield to pedestrians in marked crosswalks (even though 35% of drivers polled did not know this). But neither are aware of this fact when it comes to unmarked crosswalks. Not knowing traffic safety laws, it turns out, is actually a good thing for pedestrians. Because they do not know whether cars are supposed to stop – or if they will – they act more cautiously. Marked crosswalks, by contrast, may give pedestrians an unrealistic picture of their own safety.
Another interesting fact is that if you cross the street without looking, you’re less likely to be hit, though I wouldn’t recommend that.
The book is worth a read if you’d like to learn about safer roadway design, the lack of effectiveness of street-signs, and the causes and dangers of driver inattentiveness, just to name a few of the topics covered.
