Possibility of Crosswalk Design Independent from Signals at Basic Road Sections

Abstract

In Japan lots of traffic signals have been installed even in small intersections or crosswalks at narrow basic road sections. However, it is said that signal controlling is not always the most efficient and the safest considering various situations, especially for areas with not-so-high traffic volume. In this paper, “two-step crossing” was proposed as one of the alternatives of safety measure for non-signalized crosswalk and a risk index was derived to evaluate risks of three design types of crosswalk: “do-nothing” case, “two-step crossing” case and “signalization” case. A number of incidents were considered as the risk index and pedestrians’ and drivers’ incident occurrence was formulated in stochastic way that reflects people’s perception and psychology. As a result, by defining parameters and variables arbitrarily the study found that the “two-step crossing” can be a solution to improve a crosswalk in particular conditions while “signalization” has a significant effect on risk reduction.