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Online Newsletter of the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center: Volume 3, No. 4, Winter 2006-2007 Front Page     Traffic safety center at transportation research board 2007 Crosswalk Confusion Pedestrians and drivers need more information. Or do they? There's no crosswalk painted on the pavement. Would you as a pedestrian have the right of way? Would you as a driver have to yield? (Take the quiz .) Traffic safety experts have long suspected that the behavior of drivers and pedestrians is far more responsible for collisions than road design. At the Transportation Research Board ’ s annual meeting in Washington in January, Meghan Fehlig Mitman , a graduate student researcher at the UC Berkeley Traffic Safety Center, supplied another piece of evidence for that view. In her paper, " What They Don ’ t Know Can Kill Them, " she also   offered   some surprising reasons why. Mitman found that large numbers of drivers and pedestrians are confused about who has the right-of-way in crosswalks — especially at unmarked crossings, those extensions of the sidewalk across a road that serve as crosswalks but are not striped. According to the California Vehicle Code , “ the driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within any marked crosswalk or within any unmarked crosswalk at an intersection …” Although pedestrians have the right-of-way at these unmarked crossings, most pedestrians — and drivers — don ’ t know that. Even worse, Mitman and her group of researchers found that 35 percent of drivers surveyed did not believe pedestrians have the right-of-way at marked crosswalks . These findings emerged from a series of focus groups and surveys conducted in the SF Bay Area in 2005 and 2006. Since completing this phase of the project (and writing the paper), the research team has moved on to field observations of drivers and pedestrians in marked and unmarked crosswalks. " The ironic thing about our field observation findings is that it seems that