The Chatting Couple Problem: Quantifying Pedestrian Safety

Along this road we may sometimes avoid traffic by stepping into the grass, but that’s not always possible. Steep embankments, blind corners, and vegetation frequently force us to discontinue the social experience of walking together in exchange for safety.

My wife and I usually like to take walks in the afternoon or evening. We’re so regular about this that our neighbors tell us that we’re their inspiration for getting outside more. We usually walk side by side while talking about life, family, pets, gardening—basically, anything. On unsafe segments of road, we need to discontinue our conversation or shout while walking single file with traffic passing.

My proposed solution, putting it briefly, is this: Introduce a “side-by-side” metric into the OpenSteetMap tagging schema as a simple, relatable proxy for safety. This metric reflects how many people can comfortably walk together and maintain a conversation along a given segment.

A person tagging a road without a sidewalk in this way may be asked this: Considering the shoulder of the road, how many people can comfortably talk at a normal speaking volume (meaning: able to participate in a conversation) while in the the presence of passing traffic?

I had other solutions in mind, but I think this one is the most direct and offers a foundation on which to build something more advanced.

A good intuition of the metric is the conversing couple scenario where the road supports an undisrupted conversation between two side-by-side pedestrians and then shrinks down to a single pedestrian (possibly able to talk on a mobile phone) before declining to a zero when even that conversation becomes impossible.