Assessment of pedestrian-vehicle interaction on urban roads: a critical review

Abstract

Walking is being promoted as either a main mode of transportation or as a part of multimodal mobility. However, a rapid growth and development in urban areas has resulted in a drastic increase in human population as well as vehicular population in most of the metropolitans across the globe. Due to this, there is an unavoidable increase in conflicts between vehicular traffic and pedestrians often sharing the same road space. At an undesignated crossing, pedestrians wait for suitable inter-vehicular gap to cross the road. However, in order to reduce the waiting delay, pedestrians often take risk by accepting smaller gaps while crossing the road. It increases the probability of their collision with approaching vehicles. Apart from the frequency of crashes, the crash severity is also vastly governed by traffic flow characteristics. In this regard, it is a common belief that the reduction in speed of approaching vehicles can significantly bring down the severity of pedestrian crashes. On the other hand, vehicular movements also get obstructed due to the pedestrian activities carried out on the carriageway. During pedestrian crossing maneuvers, pedestrians often force the approaching vehicle(s) either to slow down or to change the lane which leads to reduction in the average speed of traffic stream. However, in case of pedestrians walking along the road, vehicles tend to shy away towards the center of carriageway to ensure the safe movements of pedestrians. Hence, pedestrians irrespective of crossing or walking along the road, eventually results in the reduction in speed as well as capacity of the road and sometimes prove to be a promising threat to safety of the road users. Therefore, in order to delve into the phenomena of pedestrian-vehicle interaction, one should need to study the mutual influences of pedestrian and vehicular movements on each other. In this background, this paper puts forward a detailed literature review on the assessment of pedestrian-vehicle interaction on urban roads. Findings of the paper are specific and infer the behaviors of both pedestrians and vehicles while sharing the same road space.