Pedestrian Gap Acceptance and Crossing Behavior at Signalized Intersections
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Date
2020-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
A large number of pedestrian are getting killed in traffic Road crash each year. It is known, pedestrian crash are more severe than other types of crashes. A review of pedestrian crash data shows that most of the crashes occur while the pedestrian was crossing the road. The pattern of pedestrian behavior when crossing the road is dependent on various factors such as traffic condition, pedestrian characteristics and vehicular characteristic. All these factors are pedestrian exposure to risk in relation to pedestrian crossing behavior. In this research, the main focus is leveraged on the study of gap acceptance and crossing behavior of pedestrians at signalized intersections. Because of the common and widely observed illegal crossing decisions of pedestrians at signalized intersections, it is interesting to investigate gap acceptance of pedestrians on their decision to cross at intersections. As a result, this paper has tried to cover crossing behavior of pedestrians such as: gap acceptance, compliance with signal, pedestrian-vehicle interaction in mixed traffic condition and identifying influencing factors.
For the study, a field survey was carried out at signalized intersection in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The collected data, from the three signalized intersection Saris, Bole Mikael and Shola, consists of gap data point which include both accepted and rejected vehicular gaps and probable factors that may influence crossing . Pedestrian road crossing behavior at the intersection selected has been modeled by the size of vehicular gap accepted by using multiple linear regression (MLR) technique. Choice model has been developed to capture the decision making process of pedestrian.
The result from the survey showed that pedestrian noncompliance arise with signalized rules because allocated green time is small, there is no facility assigned where they can avoid conflict and or being in a hurry. The MLR model shows pedestrian speed, vehicular speed, rolling gap, pedestrian speed change, driver yielding behavior, type of vehicle, gap type, age and lag or gap are important factor on size of gap acceptance. For the size of gap model the independent variable explain the dependent variable 72.7 % (R2) and the critical gap was found to be 4 sec. The choice model represent the data 94.2%. And from model Pedestrian make the decision to cross or not based on four major factors size of traffic gap, the vehicle speed, waiting time, and the frequency of attempts before crossing. These inferences are helpful for pedestrian facility design, policy toughening and create awareness for different stake holders.
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Keywords
Pedestrian, road crossing behavior, gap acceptance, signalized intersection