Abstract
The probability and severity of accidents at pedestrian crossings strongly depend on vehicles’ speed; hence, drivers’ speed control and awareness of driving conditions are very important. Lighting installations in the transition areas of pedestrian crossings have been set up in Polish cities in recent years to improve the visibility of pedestrian crossings and enhance drives’ awareness while approaching sensitive spots in the road network. A key study focus is to evaluate the influence of additional lighting systems on drivers’ behaviour in terms of travel speed. Drivers’ speed measures were carried out under daytime and nighttime conditions on single carriageways. Speed measurements were performed in free flow driving conditions in the vicinity of zebra crossings located in mid-block segments and at intersection inlets. The analyses conducted have shown an ambiguous influence of lighting installations on drivers’ behaviour. It has been found that drivers approaching pedestrian crossings with additional illumination systems decrease their speed significantly, but average speeds, even reduced, remain over posted speed limits. Moreover, at zebra locations, drivers’ speed under night conditions in some cases was found to be significantly higher than during the day. Based on the results obtained, some recommendations have been made to improve drives’ speed behaviour at pedestrian crosswalks.
Highlights
Road traffic crashes result from a combination of factors related to the road layout, the vehicles, the road users and the way they interact
The main goals of installing additional lighting systems on pedestrian crossings are to improve their visibility in the dark and make drivers aware that they are approaching a place of elevated road risk
The main conclusion of this the study is that pedestrian crossings with additional lighting do not have an impact on drivers as much as could be expected and drivers’ behaviour does not differ significantly from that observed in the vicinity of zebra crossings without such systems
Summary
Road traffic crashes result from a combination of factors related to the road layout, the vehicles, the road users and the way they interact. Investigations conducted in Hungary [16] focused on drivers’ behaviour and investigated the effect of chosen road measures on the number of pedestrian-related accidents using before–after data As a result, they found that crossings equipped with flashing yellow lights, refuge islands and traffic lights required car drivers to behave more appropriately. In Poland, systematic studies of pedestrian behaviour and vehicle–pedestrian interactions are very limited, even though over 30 percent of all road fatalities involve pedestrians and around 34% of all accidents involving pedestrians occur at marked pedestrian zebra crosswalks [21] This makes pedestrian crossing zones areas of elevated safety risk, and the need for improving the safety of vulnerable users has been underlined many times [22,23]. To achieve these aims, speed measurements were conducted in free-flow driving conditions at pedestrian crossings in day and nighttime conditions
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