Walking Speed of Older Pedestrians who use Canes or Walkers for Mobility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Findings are presented of a follow-up study conducted in Winnipeg, Canada, to investigate the walking speed of older pedestrians who use walkers or canes for mobility. The results are from research conducted to understand the differences between the normal and the crossing walking speeds of older pedestrians who use walkers or canes for mobility at signalized intersections. This walking speed is also compared with that of older pedestrians who ambulate without assistive devices. For the purposes of this research, normal walking speed is the speed at which pedestrians walk without needing to cross any intersection, and crossing walking speed is that at which pedestrians walk when crossing a signalized intersection. The research found that in all cases the normal speed is lower than the crossing walking speed for older pedestrians with or without assistive devices. There are no seasonal differences in the normal walking speed of older pedestrians with walkers or canes. However, the crossing walking speed is higher in winter than in summer. Regarding gender issues, older men walk faster than older women when assistive devices are not used. However, there are no gender differences in walking speed when pedestrians use walkers or canes for mobility. Although this research shows that using the current walking-speed assumption of 1.2 m/s (4.0 ft/s), as recommended in the U.S. Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, almost all older pedestrians needing walkers or canes for mobility would be excluded in the design process, it also shows other information that would be valuable for improved urban planning, transit operations, and other transportation engineering applications.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".