Road Safety Criteria for Mid-Block Pedestrian Crossing Facility and Application of ITS Technologies

Abstract

This paper describes an attempt made to evaluate the pedestrian's road crossing facility at midblock to relate with pedestrian road crossing behaviour and identify the variables influencing pedestrian road crossing decisions. The decision of pedestrians on road crossing depends on many other elements like yielding behaviour of a driver, vehicle speed, roadway width, traffic volume etc. Pedestrians road crossing data collected through videographic survey at Kozhikode city, Kerala, India were used to evaluate the pedestrian crossing facility. Regression model has been developed considering the pedestrian waiting time as dependent variable and vehicle speed and volume as independent variable. Further, a computational tool is developed to derive suitable criteria for regulating the number of pedestrian phases based on the percentage of vehicles in the queue formation for varying levels of interruptions and vehicle arrival rate. The criteria has been derived such that the negative force exerted by vehicles and drivers during pedestrian road crossing to a minimum level, through the implementation of signal control using Intelligent Transport System (ITS) technologies. Further, the queuing analysis results helps to identify the criteria for proposing grade-separated crossing based on the threshold value of the percentage of vehicles in the queue formation. From the queuing analysis, it was found that, the percentage of vehicle in queue has been increased from 19.44% to 38.89% for the arrival rate of 1200v/h when the number of pedestrian interruptions per hour is increased from 20 to 40. Also, it is observed that when the arrival rate increases from 1200 to 1800 v/h the percentage of vehicle in queue increases 19.44% to 77.78% for 20 number of pedestrian interruptions. The prediction tool developed may help the transportation policymakers and highway officials to evaluate the field conditions and to identify suitable control measures for the pedestrian facility with improved pedestrian safety and vehicular traffic efficiency.