AUBURN — An Auburn University engineering professor is building a tool that measures how much of the road a pedestrian can actually see before stepping off the curb — and where trees, parked cars and roadway geometry take that view away.
Huaguo Zhou, the Elton Z. and Lois G. Huff Professor of Transportation in civil and environmental engineering, has a new Alabama Department of Transportation project focused on pedestrian crossing sight distance at unsignalized intersections and midblock crosswalks, the locations where crashes involving people on foot are concentrated.
“We are trying to solve a puzzle: why do so many pedestrians get hit at crosswalks, especially ones without a traffic signal?” Zhou said. “The answer is often that they just can’t see the oncoming car in time.”
The math is unforgiving. “If the road is 40 feet wide and you walk at 3.5 feet per second, you need about 11 seconds,” Zhou said. “So, you need to be able to see far enough down the road to spot any car that is less than 11 seconds away. If something is blocking that view, you are crossing blind.”
The work builds on an earlier ALDOT project in which Zhou’s team used LiDAR — laser scanning that produces detailed 3D models of the roadway — to measure drivers’ sight lines at two-way stop-controlled intersections. That method was validated against field measurements and applied to more than 230 intersections across Alabama. Zhou also leads a $350,000 national study on pedestrian sight distance.
“We proved you can do this kind of analysis remotely and on a massive scale,” he said. The payoff for cities like Opelika and Auburn would be the ability to screen crosswalks for blocked visibility from existing scan data instead of sending crews corner to corner.
Source: Auburn University Samuel Ginn College of Engineering
Opelika Daily News — Tuesday Report, Sept. 15, 2026 | Compiled by Viktor AI for Opelika Daily News
