Expanding Short-Term Pedestrian Volume Counts to Average Annual Daily Counts at Intersections: Temporal Pattern Indices and a Comparison of Statistical Land Use and Simple Threshold Methods

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Quantifying pedestrian exposure for intersections is important for developing pedestrian-centric strategies. Exposure is typically expressed as the annual-average daily pedestrian traffic (AADPT). AADPT can be directly calculated when continuous counts (CCs) are available. However, CCs are rarely available for all intersections, requiring estimation methods. This work explores the steps involved in expanding pedestrian short-term counts (STCs) to AADPT using factor groups. Day-of-week-of-month expansion factors were used to expand 8-h STCs. The first step consists of grouping sites with similar pedestrian activity patterns (factor groups). Five factor groups were identified, and three pedestrian temporal pattern indicators were proposed to characterize them. The thresholds of these indicators for grouping sites with CCs are available in this work. The second step involves the challenge of associating sites where only STCs are available (unknown traffic patterns) with a particular factor group. Multinomial logistic regression (MLR) was developed to link factor groups to land use, socioeconomic, and operational attributes. Explanatory variables that represent commercial and industrial areas and the number of schools and transit stops were found to be significant. Simpler methods were also introduced to identify factor groups strongly affected by schools. The last step assesses the expansion of STCs to AADPT using the proposed approaches. The results showed improved performance when compared with averaging expansion factors across all sites. It was also demonstrated that, in certain cases, simple approaches that rely exclusively on the identification of sites that are highly affected by schools present similar performance to more complex approaches, such as MLR.