Modelling pedestrian road crossing behaviour under mixed traffic condition

Pedestrian road crossings have become a major issue in road traffic flow, especially in urban areas where there is no controll for pedestrian road crossings. Pedestrian road crossing behaviour is a serious threat to pedestrians at uncontrolled midblock crossing locations in the mixed traffic conditions. Due to increase in motor vehicle growth there is an increase in the regulation of motor vehicles only and the regulation of pedestrian is completely neglected. This increases the uncontrolled road crossing behaviour of pedestrian. The main motivation of this study is to investigate the pedestrian road crossing behaviour at the uncontrolled midblock location in India under mixed traffic condition. Pedestrian road crossing behaviour at uncontrolled midblock has been modeled by the size of vehicular gaps accepted by pedestrian using multiple linear regression (MLR) technique. Also choice model has been developed to capture the decision making process of pedestrian i.e., accepted or rejected vehicular gaps based on the discrete choice theory. Suitable study stretch, which a four lane divided urban arterial in Hyderabad, India, was selected for data collection. The collected data consists of 4198 gap data points which include both accepted and rejected vehicular gaps. Pedestrians' road crossing behaviour has been explained in terms of minimum gap acceptance value by using a rolling gap (pedestrian roll over the small vehicular gaps). It has also been explained by the binary logit model with the help of vehicular gap size, frequency of attempt and rolling gap. The study concludes that the pedestrian behavioural characteristics like the rolling gap, driver yielding behaviour and frequency of attempt plays an important role in pedestrian uncontrolled road crossing. These inferences are helpful for pedestrian facility design and controlling pedestrian safety issues at uncontrolled crossings.