Choice crossing behaviour model for Safety Margin of pedestrian at mid-blocks in India

Abstract

Today’s fast growing life where the time is most important, pedestrian want to cross the road with comfort, convenience, safety without taking any risk for the minimal delay while crossing the road at mid-block crosswalk locations. The traditional way of measuring safety is in terms of the number of accidents, which occurred in that area based on accidental data. For, developing countries like India, the accuracy of accident details is highly questionable. Hence there is a need of a more effective safety evaluation technique which is proactive; to develop predictive models. A video graphic survey has been carried out in western and northern part of Indian cities to investigate pedestrian safety at mid-block crosswalks in an urban setting. A Binary Logistic Model (the probability of pedestrian-vehicle non-conflict) was developed to predict the probability of avoiding conflict with an approaching vehicle and other parameters on pedestrians’ decisions whether to cross the street at unprotected mid-block crosswalks. The result shows pedestrian behavioural characteristics significantly affect the PSM value as well as the probability of PVNC behaviour. Model shows that the decision to cross the street with or without safety depends on the type of approaching vehicle, vehicle speed, pedestrian speed, vehicular gap available, number of lanes, pedestrian rolling behaviour, land use, pedestrian age, platoon size, accepted gap/lag, type of gap. Further, the increase in the vehicle speed resulted in the increase PVNC. Pedestrian’s individual characteristics were found to be insignificant whereas gender was found to have an impact on SM. Rolling behaviour, presence of marking, number of lanes discourages pedestrians towards the decision to cross, regardless of the traffic gap. The outcome of elasticity analysis indicated that the traffic gap size, pedestrian speed, vehicle speed, concentration on gap are the parameters, which influences the pedestrian crossing decisions.