Safe Routes for Seniors

Seniors in New York City suffer a higher rate of pedestrian injuries than other adults in the city; however, walking is a desirable form of physical activity for seniors because it is free and low-impact. Therefore, improving the pedestrian environment in New York City was paramount to efforts to improve cardiovascular health through increasing physical activity among seniors.

Transportation Alternatives created the Safe Routes for Seniors program in order to identify obstacles to walking in the community, find ways to overcome these obstacles and work with the local government to make physical improvements and policies changes that support walkability. The seniors involved in the program reported that their main reasons for not walking or not walking as far as they would like were because of uneven sidewalks which caused them to trip, inability to cross the street within the walk cycle and vehicles not respecting right of way in cross walks. Given these findings, the program created policy and design recommendations that would improve the safety of the streets for seniors such as installing benches and refuge centers in the median divide roads and re-timing pedestrian cross walks. These recommendations were presented to New York City Council and other elected officials.

To improve cardiovascular health among seniors by improving the pedestrian environment in New York.

The work of Transportation Alternatives has brought about significant physical improvements to the pedestrian environment in New York, some were accomplished in as short of a time frame as six months. The most notable of the improvements was the conversion of a service road into a small park and pedestrian space which re-aligned a crosswalk of a busy intersection which now allows pedestrians a higher level of predictability for vehicles going through the intersection.