A traffic engineer at The Ohio State University has been invited to serve on an expert panel of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.
Balaji Ponnu, with Transportation and Traffic Management at Ohio State, joins a project of the National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) titled “Pedestrian Crosswalk Spacing and Placement Guidance to Improve Safety.”
Ponnu, who received a doctorate in civil engineering from Ohio State in 2018, believes he was asked to participate because he serves as the traffic engineer for a large college campus in the country and due to his work investigating choice of countermeasures and pedestrian volume patterns of college crosswalks. His previous research has also helped to develop measures to discourage jaywalking on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Earlier this year, Ponnu presented his findings on pedestrian crossing volume patterns at the 101st annual meeting of the Transportation Research Board, which was held in Washington, D.C.
“College crosswalks are very different from public road crosswalks in that they’re very unique in terms of heavy pedestrian movements and a young student population,” he said.