SYSTEMATIC APPROACH TO SAFETY MANAGEMENT AT PEDESTRIAN CROSSINGS

Abstract

Pedestrian safety in today's big cities remains an actual problem and it requires new approaches to the management of all traffic and pedestrian flows The complexity of such management lies in the ambiguity of the criteria chosen to ensure the safety of traffic and pedestrians, and in the presence of many restrictions that accompany the functioning of the infrastructure of big city. The substantiation of systematic risk-based approach use to the management of safety at pedestrian crossings in big cities has been presented in the article. The fundamental difference of proposed risk-based approach to the management of safety at pedestrian crossings is the definition of road traffic accident as a set of consecutive, parallel (simultaneous) or sequentially parallel dangerous events that develop in time and space and under certain circumstances can cause undesirable consequences. The structural and logical models of road traffic accident at three types of pedestrian crossings (regulated, marked and unmarked) have been developed using methods of general theory of random processes management, graphs theory, imitation modeling and Boolean algebra. The proposed structural and logical models allowed estimation of the probability of road traffic accident at each considered pedestrian crossings. Complexity of these models increases from unmarked to regulated crossings. Based on these models, the probabilities of road accidents at the considered pedestrian crossings were estimated. A characteristic feature of all considered models is the presence of factors that are related to the psychophysiological state and level of responsibility of road users. It has been showed that one of the effective measures towards prevention of road traffic accidents is elimination of human factor as one of the reasons of their occurrence by forming the responsibility of both pedestrians and drivers for their own actions while moving. It has been observed multidirectional tendency in the change of level of responsibility in two participants of road traffic – pedestrians and drivers- when moving on pedestrian crossings of different types: regulated, marked and unmarked. Obviously, such multidirectional tendencies do not contribute to improving the level of safety of road traffic and pedestrians and confirm the need for further comprehensive study of this issue and substantiation of appropriate measures.