When designing roadways and communities to benefit an aging road user, engineers and planners should consider the natural changes in vision, fitness and flexibility, attention span, and reaction time that occur as we age. For example, making left turns or getting stranded in the crosswalk when the signal changes can be challenging for all road users, but especially those that are experiencing age-related changes.
Building roadways and livable communities with Florida's aging population in mind is critical to the continued safe mobility of older adults. As stakeholders, engineers and planners can help support two focus areas in the Safe Mobility for Life Strategic Action Plan – Livable Communities and Mobility Independence. You can help us meet the objectives of the two focus areas in the following ways:
Livable Communities
- Encourage the implementation of proven safety countermeasures that address the specific physical and visual challenges affecting aging road users. (Strategy 4.2.3)
- Educate transportation professionals on Complete Streets and context-based design practices and other safety countermeasures that benefit aging road users, including those found in the Florida Greenbook, FDOT Design Manual, and Traffic Engineering Manual. (Strategy 4.2.4)
- Identify and promote proven engineering solutions that benefit aging road users in locations with high number of reported and verified aging road user fatalities and serious injuries. (Strategy 4.2.6)
Mobility Independence
- Develop educational materials and resources on the use of automated vehicles and/or shuttles as viable transportation options. (Strategy 5.1.4)
The resources on this page help support the Coalition’s data-driven approach to eliminating fatalities and serious injuries for Florida’s aging road users. We will be adding more resources and guidance in the near future to directly support engineers and planners. Sign up for our Coalition updates to receive a notification when these resources are available.
eTraffic
FDOT’s State Traffic Engineering and Operations Office developed eTraffic, a GIS based web application, that integrates various FDOT traffic related datasets and is used for reporting and informational purposes. The datasets are reflected as interactive layers that can be activated or deactivated. Safe Mobility for Life is one of those layers and was designed to support our proactive data-driven approach to eliminating fatalities and reducing serious injuries for Florida’s aging road users.
Click here, to explore other eTraffic map layers.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the eTraffic Safe Mobility for Life Tab?
- eTraffic data is grouped across several tabs corresponding to specific FDOT initiatives, traffic characteristics inventory, Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), interim approvals and requests to experiment. These include but are not limited to wrong-way driving, mid-block crossings, traffic signals, pedestrian crosswalks, network screening analysis, etc.
- FDOT’s Safe Mobility for Life Program has a dedicated tab in eTraffic that displays aging road user data layers to identify items such as priority intersections, priority counties, community partners, and target regions.
What are the layers on the Safe Mobility for Life eTraffic tab? What do they mean?
- Safe Mobility for Life Priority Intersections: Intersections identified to have high number of crashes in their respective categories, with special emphasis on those having fatalities or serious injuries.
- All Ages
- 65+
- Non-Motorist 65+
- Non-Motorist All Ages
- Alcohol-related (all ages)
- Percent of 65+ Licensed Drivers: Share of licensed drivers in each county that are 65+.
- 65+ Driver Involvement: Fatal Crashes involving a 65+ driver per 100,000 Licensed Drivers who are 65+.
- Urban Target Regions: Areas that experience a higher number of crashes involving aging road users in urban counties.
- Rural Target Regions: Areas that experience a higher number of crashes involving aging road users in rural counties.
- Aging Road User Priority Counties: Top 10 counties (for each Rural and Urban areas) having the highest rate of 65+ crashes relative to 65+ population.
- Percent of Population Aged 65+: Share of resident population in each county aged 65 and over.
What are the benefits of using eTraffic to support aging road users?
- eTraffic allows us to visualize trends, crash events, and other data elements together to support Safe Mobility for Life’s proactive, data-driven approach to reducing crashes, fatalities, and injuries to aging road users (65+). These are some examples of potential uses:
- To help with decision making regarding rural areas, the following Safe Mobility for Life layers can be overlayed to get a comprehensive picture of regions that might need intervention and available partners to implement it:
- Rural target regions
- Priority counties
- Community partners
- Priority intersections
- For decision making regarding distribution of non-motorized materials, the following Safe Mobility for Life layers can be overlayed to understand areas of opportunity to distribute them:
- Urban target regions (non-motorized)
- Priority counties
- Community partners
- Non-motorized priority intersections
- To understand the greater context about aging road user areas of concern, layers from the Safe Mobility for Life tab can be combined with those from other tabs. For instance, overlaying the Safe Mobility for Life priority intersections and Safe Strides to Zero candidate intersections would enable the analyst to see the interplay and overlap between the two and find opportunities for action.
- To help with decision making regarding rural areas, the following Safe Mobility for Life layers can be overlayed to get a comprehensive picture of regions that might need intervention and available partners to implement it:
- For instance, if someone is interested in aging road user trends and crash events, it may be of interest to look at the interplay between Priority Intersections for Aging Road Users layer versus Priority Intersections for All Road Users layer. It is worth mentioning that layers from multiple tabs can also be combined. It could be interesting, for example, to visualize the Safe Mobility for Life intersections alongside the Safe Strides to Zero candidate intersections to identify common intersections or corridors of concern.
Sources: FLHSMV Closeout Data (data reflects records with known ages only), BEBR Population Estimates, FLHSMV Licensed Driver Data.
No Warranties:This site and its content is made available by the Florida Department of Transportation on an "as is", "as available" basis without warranties of any kind, express or implied.
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