The effect of drivers’ eye contact on pedestrians’ perceived safety

V Onkhar,P Bazilinskyy,D Dodou,J.C.F De Winter

doi:10.1016/j.trf.2021.10.017

V Onkhar, P Bazilinskyy + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2021.10.017

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Abstract

Many fatal accidents that involve pedestrians occur at road crossings, and are attributed to a breakdown of communication between pedestrians and drivers. Thus, it is important to investigate how forms of communication in traffic, such as eye contact, influence crossing decisions. Thus far, there is little information about the effect of drivers’ eye contact on pedestrians’ perceived safety to cross the road. Existing studies treat eye contact as immutable, i.e., it is either present or absent in the whole interaction, an approach that overlooks the effect of the timing of eye contact. We present an online crowdsourced study that addresses this research gap. 1835 participants viewed 13 videos of an approaching car twice, in random order, and held a key whenever they felt safe to cross. The videos differed in terms of whether the car yielded or not, whether the car driver made eye contact or not, and the times when the driver made eye contact. Participants also answered questions about their perceived intuitiveness of the driver’s eye contact behavior. The results showed that eye contact made people feel considerably safer to cross compared to no eye contact (an increase in keypress percentage from 31% to 50% was observed). In addition, the initiation and termination of eye contact affected perceived safety to cross more strongly than continuous eye contact and a lack of it, respectively. The car’s motion, however, was a more dominant factor. Additionally, the driver’s eye contact when the car braked was considered intuitive, and when it drove off, counterintuitive. In summary, this study demonstrates for the first time how drivers’ eye contact affects pedestrians’ perceived safety as a function of time in a dynamic scenario and questions the notion in recent literature that eye contact in road interactions is dispensable. These findings may be of interest in the development of automated vehicles (AVs), where the driver of the AV might not always be paying attention to the environment.

Highlights

Worldwide, more than 50% of traffic-related deaths are that of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians (World Health Organi zation, 2020)
Participants who indicated that they did not read the instructions (n = 29), who indicated that they were younger than 18 (n = 3), who completed the study within 1000 s, suggesting cheating or carelessness (n = 89), who could not be linked to the data due to a data storage issue or cheating (n = 14), who made more than 2 mistakes out of the 10 test questions (n = 16), or who suffered video playback delays, defined as more than 2 videos taking more than 5 s too long to complete (n = 49) were excluded, leaving 1835 participants from 64 countries
This study aimed to examine the effect of drivers’ eye contact on pedestrians’ perceived safety to cross a road

Summary

Introduction

More than 50% of traffic-related deaths are that of vulnerable road users such as pedestrians (World Health Organi zation, 2020). Most pedestrian deaths occur in urban areas at non-intersection locations (National Highway Traffic Safety Adminis tration, 2020; SWOV, 2020). A possible cause of these casualties is a breakdown in communication with other road users such as car drivers (European Road Safety Observatory, 2018). Farber (2016) noted that road users communicate via informal means, such as eye contact, in addition to relying on formal traffic rules. Understanding the role of eye contact in traffic is a relevant topic in recent times, with the development of AVs in which the driver may be intermittently attentive.

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