A Study of Pedestrian Traffic Safety at Three-leg Unsignalized Intersections

Abstract

The damage caused by vehicle-pedestrian traffic accidents is no less than that caused by vehicle-vehicle traffic accidents in terms of the health, economic, psychological, and social effects on both individuals and the community, especially in urban areas. However, poor reporting of pedestrian crashes causing injury and fatality to traffic officials has created a loss of authenticity in the data on pedestrian traffic accidents, thus necessitating study of the causes of these incidents to help inform developments in pedestrian traffic safety. This research uses a sustainable strategy to examine traffic conflicts or “near-crash” scenarios to study pedestrian traffic safety rather than waiting for traffic accidents to happen. Data on six types of pedestrian traffic conflict were collected at selected sites in Baghdad, Karbala, and Babylon based on a case study of three-legs unsignalized intersections. The results showed that the third type of pedestrian traffic conflict (PC3) was the most dangerous in terms of the value of Severity Rate, particularly in approach No.16 in the city of Karbala. The developed models also showed that exponential relationships offer explanations of the relationships between hourly pedestrian traffic conflict/approaches and pedestrian delays or conflict, with the coefficient of determination for these ranging between 0.7133 and 0.8966.