Pedestrian Road Crossing Behavior Under Mixed Traffic Conditions: A Comparative Study of an Intersection Before and After Implementing Control Measures

Traffic accidents involving pedestrians have become a major safety problem in most of the developing countries like India due to rapid urbanization, increase in vehicular growth and lack of adherence to traffic regulations by both drivers and pedestrians. The existing roads design does not provide adequate facilities for pedestrians and hence, there exists a constant conflict between the pedestrians and the vehicles in sharing the limited space available on a road. At intersections, pedestrian crossing behavior is even more complex since the vehicles have very little response time to control the vehicles, particularly in urban areas. All these issues are pointing towards the research work required for studying the road crossing behavior of pedestrians at urban intersections. The main motivation of this study is to investigate the changes in pedestrian road crossing behavior of an intersection under mixed traffic conditions before and after signal installation. For this purpose, traffic and pedestrian data were collected from an intersection located in Mangalore city. Different parameters like age, gender, crossing patterns, crossing times, waiting times and crossing speeds of pedestrians, speed and types of vehicles and vehicular flows were extracted from the videos. The study analysis shows that majority of the pedestrians chooses one-step crossing after signal installation since they get sufficient gap to cross the road during the red phase of the signal provided for vehicles. The waiting times of the pedestrians were increased after installation of the signal since pedestrians have to wait for gaps until the vehicles get dissipated during the green phase. The 15th percentile crossing speed of pedestrians for both the scenarios were lesser than the crossing speed (1.2 m/s) used in pedestrian facility design as per Indian Road Congress (IRC 103). Critical gap of pedestrians has reduced marginally due to the decrease in crossing speeds of pedestrians after installation of the signal. A model was developed considering pedestrian gap size as the dependent variable and pedestrian and traffic characteristics as the independent variables using multiple linear regression (MLR) technique. A total of 468 and 333 accepted gaps of pedestrians were used for modeling the before and after scenarios, respectively. It was found that pedestrian jaywalking behavior is reduced after installation of the signal. The study concludes that after signal installation the factors such as traffic volume, average speed of vehicles and age-group play a predominant role in estimating the pedestrian gap acceptance. This study will be useful for understanding the complex pedestrian road crossing behavior at intersections under mixed traffic conditions. The findings of this paper have great implications for designing pedestrian facilities and also, for devising traffic management measures for pedestrian safety.