Investigating effect of surrounding factors on human behaviour at un-controlled mid-block crosswalks in indian cities

Highlights

• The study comprehends the effect of surrounding factors on pedestrian crossing in different cities of India.

• The study investigates the effect of pedestrian characteristics on walking speed, gap-acceptance behaviour and delay.

• Study recommends 50th percentile (1.15 m/s) speed as design speed for mid-block crossings, particularly for emerging nations like India.

• An average 6.2 s is recommended as mean gap acceptance for design of pedestrian facility at mid-block crosswalks under mixed traffic conditions.

• An average 8 s is recommended where female or elder pedestrians are present in significant proportion.

Abstract

The present study is conducted to comprehend the naturalistic behaviour of pedestrian at urban mid-block crosswalks due to surrounding factors under mixed traffic conditions in India. The research wok reported here mainly investigates the effect of individual characteristics reflected on crossing behaviour at nine study locations in different cities of India. The selected study sections show a wide variation due to city characteristics, roadway characteristics and geographical conditions. The study confirms that young pedestrians walk faster than the rest. Study results also indicate that city characteristics and geographical conditions significantly influences crossing behaviour of pedestrian. The average crossing speed of pedestrian is measured to be higher (1.205 m/s) in Mega city as compared to Metro city (1.036 m/s), indicating effect of city characteristics. Considering gender effect, it is conferred that, male pedestrians walks faster than female pedestrians. An average crossing speed of 1.15 m/s is recommended for operational analysis and design under mixed-traffic conditions, especially in India. Further, actual field observations confirmed that the male pedestrian bear lower values of delay compared to females, which indicates that female pedestrians bear longer waiting time to safely cross the road section. For pedestrians, minimum gap of 4.73 s is accepted by the young, which is also closer to the critical value, indicating that young pedestrians show higher risk-taking behaviour. Considering safety of pedestrians, an average value of 6.2 s is recommended for designing crossing facility, whereas at locations, where female or elder pedestrians are present in significant proportion, a higher value of 8 s, is recommended. It was also found that with increase in number of traffic lanes and vehicular flow, pedestrian crossing time increases, which forces pedestrians to perform stage-wise crossing. It is observed that delay at curb side is higher due to rejection of smaller gaps, but same gap can be accepted with increase in platoon size. The outcome of this research work may be considered as a strong base in light of reviewing current practices prevailing for designing pedestrian crossings at uncontrolled mid-block sections under mixed traffic condition.

Introduction

Generally, pedestrian prefers to cross the road at mid-block section, as it’s the shortest alley-way. In the case of signalized intersection, interface between the approaching vehicles and the crossing pedestrian is minimum with less chance of crashes. Over last decades, due to exponential increment in the vehicular growth, each category of the urban road faces heavy traffic volume, which can lead into incidents not only for pedestrians but also for vehicular traffic. In India, most of the pedestrians crosswalks on urban roads are uncontrolled or un-signalized, where pedestrian are forced to find a gap to cross the section of road under mixed-traffic conditions, which is quite unsafe, as vehicular speed varies with the surrounding condition and categories of the vehicles on the roads.

Due to high traffic volume on the roadway the waiting time of the pedestrian increases at the curb-side (Kadali and Vedagiri, 2013a, Kadali and Vedagiri, 2013b), and pedestrian prefers to cross the road by a rolling gap at different stages of roadway (Jain et al., 2014), adjusting walking speed to avoid the conflict with the approaching vehicles. Such behavior of pedestrians at urban mid-block crosswalks results in higher chances of pedestrian fatalities attributing to amplified pedestrian-vehicle interaction. Well-designed mid-block crosswalks can offer safety to pedestrians, when it is located appropriately. Hence, providing suitable pedestrian crossing facility under favorable environmental conditions for a given transportation system, is a thought-provoking process. In a broader sense, unplanned mid-block crosswalks hint at analyzing the pedestrian safety since; pedestrian crossing makes complex interactions with vehicular traffic at such locations. Pedestrian crossing at un-signalized mid-block is analyzed by studying gap acceptance behavior considering respective vehicular flow, change in walking speed, change in crossing path, pedestrian gender and approaching vehicular speed.

The pedestrian crossing behavior at mid-block is fairly different as compared to the other walking facilities considering direct intrusion of vehicular traffic, which is not in the case of sidewalk (Kadali and Vedagiri, 2013a, Kadali and Vedagiri, 2013b), stairways (Shah et al. 2016), subways (Arnaud and Angele, 2007), foot over bridge, and escalators (Mohd Lazi et al., 2015). Walking speed is the governing parameter to design the any pedestrian facilities (Yannis et al., 2013, Rastogi et al., 2011, Chandra and Bharti, 2013, Shah et al., 2015a, Shah et al., 2015b). Pedestrian walking speed also varies with the prevailing conditions such as environmental, traffic flow (Chandra and Bharti, 2013), and also depends on the individual characteristic such as age, gender, direction, luggage condition (Fruin, 1971, Laxman et al., 2010, Chandra et al., 2014a, Chandra et al., 2014b). Design manuals, Traffic Engineering Handbook (Dewar, 1992), suggest that the walking speed of 0.91–0.98 m/s is an appropriate speed for the design of pedestrian facilities. The U.S. Institute of Transportation Engineers study (ITE Committee 4A-6 1983) incorporated the elderly pedestrian for designing pedestrian facility; it suggests that the 0.75 m/s walking speed is appropriate estimate for a facility having higher proportion of elderly pedestrian. Whereas, Highway Capacity Manual (HCM, 2010) suggested 1.2 m/s walking speed, when the proportion of elderly pedestrian is less than or equal 20% or 1.0 m/s, otherwise.

The Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) for Streets and Highways; Federal Highway Administration, 2003) suggest a standard value of 1.21 m/s irrespective of individual characteristics. From the literature, it is also observed that the Americans walk with higher speed (Knoblauch et al., 1996, Guerrier and Jolibois, 1998, Gates et al., 2006, Fitzpatrick et al., 2006) of 0.97–1.34 m/s as compared to the other Western countries (Sjostedt, 1967, Cresswell et al., 1978) which is observed to be 0.90 m/s. Bowman and Vecellio (1994) studied on Swedish pedestrian and found that the 15% of the older pedestrians walk at lower speed of 0.7 m/s. Coffin and Morrall (1995) recommended a walking speed of 1.0 m/s as a design speed at mid-block crossings, where there are large numbers of older pedestrians. Holland and Hill (2007) also identified that the age and gender as influencing parameters during crossing. The 15th percentile value obtained by Di Pietro and King (1970) was 0.76 m/s for individual pedestrian, 0.67 m/s for pedestrians in groups of two, and 0.61 m/s for pedestrian in groups of three and more. Hamed (2001) observed that the female pedestrians are waiting for more time than male to cross the road. Holland and Hill (2007) found that the females were perceived higher risk than males.

A number of studies (For example: Mohan et al., 2009) reported that the traffic crashes increase annually by 8% and moreover, 60% of victims are pedestrians. About 85% of these fatalities are reported at midblock sections. Kumar and Parida (2011) reported that 54% of the crashes are associated with road crossings. Statistics explicitly show that pedestrian safety is a major challenge for planners, traffic engineers and policy makers. Researchers also studied about the safety aspect, especially for the elderly pedestrians and reported that the elderly pedestrian usually accept larger time gaps to cross the section of road (Oxley et al., 2005, Lobjois and Cavallo, 2007). Tarawneh (2001) observed that male crossing speed (1.35 m/s) was significantly higher than female pedestrian (1.33 m/s) in Jordan. Authors also observed the average crossing speed of 1.34 m/s and 15th percentile speed of 1.11 m/s at mid-block. Daaman and Hoogendorn (2007) observed that the older female pedestrians are the slowest in the Netherlands with crossing speeds of 1.18 m/s. Oxley et al. (2005) also investigated the effect of age on ability to choose a safe time gap on a crossing. It was further observed that the some of the elderly pedestrian wait longer for safe available gap than the younger counterpart.

Palamarthy et al. (1994) found that pedestrians are more likely to look for an overall gap, than lane-based individual traffic streams, while crossing. The authors also reported the average critical gaps based on individual traffic streams varies from 2.00 s to 7.14 s. Many researchers observed that the crossing speed of pedestrian varies with the number of lanes, and vehicular characteristics. Pengfei et al. (2013) found that the pedestrians crossing speed on the second half of the crosswalk is systematically faster than the first half and also observed that children’s behaviors are influenced by adults and children are more relying on their parents, which will influence overall pedestrian flow as well as vehicular characteristics at mid-block section.

Different methods were reported in literature for computing pedestrian delay at unsignalized crossing. Roddin (1981) described a method for calculating moderate (<18 s) mean pedestrian delay at un-signalized intersections. Authors correlated hourly traffic volume in both directions to delay and found that delay as an inverse function of traffic volume with a delay parameter of 0.3. Smith (1987) demonstrated the effect of crossing width and conflicting vehicle volume on pedestrian delay. It was found that delay increases with increase in traffic volume and crossing width. Palamarthy et al. (1994) developed a model with critical gap and traffic volume for mean pedestrian delay for different pedestrians crossing at un-signalized intersection. Virkler (1998) developed a model for calculating delay, based on queuing theory assuming random vehicle arrivals and normal crossing speeds. The expression was derived as a power function. HCM, 2000 correlates delay with vehicular traffic and group critical gap at agivenlocation. The delay is used in the manual to estimate the LOS for a at crossing location. Nteziyaremye and Sinclair (2013) investigates the crossing behavior of pedestrians negotiating different types of pedestrian crossing facilities in the City of Stellenbosch, in South Africa. The findings of the study highlighted important areas that should be targeted to address the pedestrian safety problem. Easwarapadcham et al. (2013) found that pedestrian delays increased as pedestrian volumes decreased and traffic volumes increased. Further, SIDRA model was developed independently to show the relationship between pedestrian delay and traffic volume at varying pedestrian volumes. In general, pedestrian delays increased as traffic volumes increased.

Based on literature, it is concluded that the pedestrian crossing behavior is influenced by several individual characteristics, environmental factors, demographic, and roadway characteristics. Many researchers experienced that pedestrian crossing behavior is also influenced by their approach, apparent behavioral control and behavioral intention (Evans and Norman, 1998). Despite a number of studies concerning individual characteristics on pedestrian flow, especially on walking speed, there are no consistent conclusions for the influence of gender, age, luggage carrying or other factors. From the Table 1, it is revealed that the crossing speeds of Asian developing countries are lower than the Western countries. This may partly result from the inconsistency of the observation sites (e.g., crosswalk, sidewalk, and airport corridor), compositions of pedestrian individual characteristics, environmental conditions, characteristics of study site, and vehicular characteristics. Henceforth, the strategies and research studies of the developed countries cannot be applied in developing countries. Looking to the significance and lacking in the pedestrian studies, present paper mainly focused on the pedestrian crossing behavior at uncontrolled mid-block locations under mixed traffic conditions in different cities of India. Viewing to the disparity in the pedestrian studies and results from review, present study formulate the following research questions:

• What are the implications of individual characteristics and crossing speeds on safety measures and design of appropriate crossing facilities?

• What should be the appropriate measure for pedestrian safety while crossing the road under mix-traffic condition?

• What are the effects of pedestrian delay and vehicular gap at curbside/median side on driver behavior and pedestrian safety during crossing?

• What is the effect of city characteristics on pedestrian crossing behavior?

• What is the implication of varying roadway width and number of lanes on pedestrian gap acceptance and rolling behavior while crossing?

In view of research questions the paper is organized in five sections. Section 1, presents brief introduction of crossing speed considering individual characteristics and discusses parameters which affect the gap acceptance behavior at mid-block crosswalks through available literature. Section 2 describe the methods including sampling, procedure which is adopted for data collection and statistical analysis: presents various statistical tests. Section 3 discuss the results obtained from the statistical analysis of crossing speeds considering different factors. Important findings are discussed on crossing speeds and pedestrian gap acceptance, delay behavior at mid-block crosswalks in Section 4 followed by conclusions in Section 5.