Welcome -- enjoy your adventure through these pages!

Hang onto your seat belt -- this Self-Study Guide is intended to help you prepare students for crossings with no traffic signal or stop sign ("uncontrolled crossings"), with information and strategies that have accumulated and been modified and refined during a journey of understanding that has taken more than 30 years. It was revised in July, 2021 and again in Fall, 2025.

• They should know that the strategy "cross when quiet / all-clear" is reliable only when they have enough warning that vehicles are approaching.
• They will find themselves in either a:
  • "Situation of Confidence" where they can be confident that if they start to cross whenever it's quiet/clear, they'd be able to detect any approaching vehicle that is close enough to reach them.
    OR
  • "Situation of Uncertainty for gap judgment" where, even if it's quiet/clear when they start to cross, vehicles can get close enough to reach them without their being able to hear/see those vehicles.
• They should be able to recognize Situations of Uncertainty and Situations of Confidence by being able to intuitively compare the warning times of a sample of approaching vehicles with their crossing time. .
  • at Situations of Uncertainty, they need to analyze the risk of crossing, and use alternatives when the risk is not acceptable.
    
  • at Situations of Confidence, they need to know how to reliably determine crossable gaps in traffic (using specific listening or visual skills).
    
    
Each of these is fully addressed in this Self-Study Guide, and there is a flow chart of skills and tasks at the beginning of Section 2.
So if you're ready, let's get started!

Self-Study Guide

The Self-Study Guide has 5 sections:
• Section 1: Introduction to Crossings with No Traffic Control (research; best practice)
  What are uncontrolled crossings, what strategies can we use to cross them, and how can we recognize when the strategy "cross when quiet" is reliable vs. when we are in a "Situation of Uncertainty"?
• Section 2: Teaching students to recognize Situations of Uncertainty [revised July, 2021]
  How can we teach students to recognize Situations of Uncertainty for gap judgment?
  
  (intuitive understanding of crossing time; comparing warning time of approaching vehicles with crossing time; flow chart for analyzing situations)
• Section 3: You are in a Situation of Uncertainty -- What Now?
  What to do when you are in a Situation of Uncertainty?
  
  (analyzing risks; making decisions; considering what is "safe," and using alternatives)
• Section 4: Teaching students to determine when there is a crossable gap in traffic
  When they are in Situations of Confidence, teaching students to determine when they have time to cross
  
  (learning the effect of masking sounds; scanning for traffic; judging the speed and distance of vehicles)
• Section 5: Applications! Vignettes, Frequently Asked Questions, and Workshop Suggestions
  Case studies (vignettes), frequently asked questions, "freaky findings" and workshop suggestions

At the top of every page in the Self-Study Guide is a navigation bar with the following links:
• Section (#?) (in the top left corner) links to a list of the contents of each page in that section.
• Self-Study Guide has a link back to this page.
• OUTLINE links to a table of contents for the Self-Study Guide, listing the topic for each page.
• INDEX has an alphabetized list of topics from Sections 1-4, and links to find them.
• CHECKLISTS are cheat-sheets for teaching students and using the procedures
• REVIEW has study questions covering all the essential information.
  
  
Additional link in the navigation bar at the top of the first page of each Section is:

• QUIZ/CERTIFICATE explains how to take the quiz and earn a certificate of completion.
  
  

The Self-Study Guide has a quiz designed to indicate which areas you need to review further. For more information about the quiz, click here. To get the code needed to take the quiz, contact me.

You can earn 5 hours of ACVREP-approved CE credit. For more information, click here.

The APH program Crossings with No Traffic Control: Teaching Concepts and Skills to Deal with Them provides logical, sequenced modules which I developed for O&M specialists to use when teaching their students the concepts and skills outlined in this Self-Study Guide. It includes carefully-selected stereophonic high-fidelity recordings of approaching vehicles, masking sounds, and other simulations.

• Introduction (17 minutes)
• Skills needed to deal with uncontrolled crossings (10 minutes)
• Participants practice comparing warning time with crossing time (interactive - 15 minutes)
• How do you recognize Situations of Uncertainty and Confidence? (6 minutes)
• Analyzing the risk of crossing (interactive -- 37 minutes)
• When do we introduce these skills? The adventures of Greg and Rebecca learning the skills (videos - 25 minutes)
• Skills needed for crossing in Situations of Confidence (10 minutes)
  
  

This page explains how we used the APH street-crossing program to teach street-crossing concepts and skills remotely, with the student and instructor each in their own homes.

Young Students Learn about Street-Crossing in Group Workshop

Innovative O&M instructors Josee Martin and Denise Guitar organized an exciting workshop for their students to learn some of the skills and concepts needed for crossings with no traffic control. The workshop was held May 2-3, 2013 in New Brunswick, Canada, and the students were not the only ones to learn!

You can click here to follow the workshop and how the students learned about these street crossings, and find out some of the advantages of teaching students in groups.