An Experimental Study of Driver and Pedestrian Interaction during the Crossing Conflict

Author(s):  
A. Katz ◽  
D. Zaidel ◽  
A. Elgrishi

A controlled experiment was conducted to determine the relative importance of pedestrian, vehicle, and situational factors in influencing drivers to give way to crossing pedestrians. The following variables were combined in a complete factorial design: (1) type of crossing; (2) distance between oncoming vehicle and pedestrian; (3) orientation of pedestrian; (4) number of pedestrians; and (5) approach velocity of vehicle. Trained pedestrians performed the start of an ordinary street crossing attempt and interacted with regular drivers whose response was measured in terms of changes in vehicle velocity. The experiment was replicated at two sites for a total of 960 crossing trials. The results show that drivers slowed down, or stopped more, for crossing pedestrians when: (1) the approach speed of the vehicle was low; (2) the crossing took place on a marked crosswalk; (3) there was a relatively long distance between the vehicle and the pedestrian's point of entry into the road; (4) a group of pedestrians, rather than an individual, attempted to cross; and, (5) the pedestrian did not look at the approaching vehicle. Additionally, female drivers and older drivers slowed down more than other drivers. Implications of the results for pedestrian safety, road design, and further research are discussed.

Author(s):  
Thierry Brenac

This paper deals with safety at horizontal curves on two-lane roads outside urban areas and the way the road design standards of different European countries account for this safety aspect. After a review of some research results, the main aspects of curve geometry and the curve's place in the horizontal alignment are analyzed. The main conclusions are that the traditional design speed approach is insufficient and that formal complementary rules in road design standards, especially to improve compatibility between successive elements of the alignment, must be introduced. If such complementary rules already exist in some national standards, they are neither frequent nor homogeneous throughout the different countries, and it seems that they are not based on sufficiently developed knowledge.


Author(s):  
Byeongjoon Noh ◽  
Dongho Ka ◽  
David Lee ◽  
Hwasoo Yeo

Road traffic accidents are a leading cause of premature deaths and globally pose a severe threat to human lives. In particular, pedestrians crossing the road present a major cause of vehicle–pedestrian accidents in South Korea, but we lack dense behavioral data to understand the risk they face. This paper proposes a new analytical system for potential pedestrian risk scenes based on video footage obtained by road security cameras already deployed at unsignalized crosswalks. The system can automatically extract the behavioral features of vehicles and pedestrians, affecting the likelihood of potentially dangerous situations after detecting them in individual objects. With these features, we can analyze the movement patterns of vehicles and pedestrians at individual sites, and understand where potential traffic risk scenes occur frequently. Experiments were conducted on four selected behavioral features: vehicle velocity, pedestrian position, vehicle–pedestrian distance, and vehicle–crosswalk distance. Then, to show how they can be useful for monitoring the traffic behaviors on the road, the features are visualized and interpreted to show how they may or may not contribute to potential pedestrian risks at these crosswalks: (i) by analyzing vehicle velocity changes near the crosswalk when there are no pedestrians present; and (ii) analyzing vehicle velocities by vehicle–pedestrian distances when pedestrians are on the crosswalk. The feasibility of the proposed system is validated by applying the system to multiple unsignalized crosswalks in Osan city, South Korea.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 2039
Author(s):  
Juan F. Dols ◽  
Jaime Molina ◽  
F. Javier Camacho-Torregrosa ◽  
David Llopis-Castelló ◽  
Alfredo García

The analysis of road safety is critical in road design. Complying to guidelines is not enough to ensure the highest safety levels, so many of them encourage designers to virtually recreate and test their roads, benefitting from the evolution of driving simulators in recent years. However, an accurate recreation of the road and its environment represents a real bottleneck in the process. A very important limitation lies in the diversity of input data, from different sources and requiring specific adaptations for every single simulator. This paper aims at showing a framework for recreating faster virtual scenarios by using an Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)-based file. This methodology was compared to two other conventional methods for developing driving scenarios. The main outcome of this study has demonstrated that with a data exchange file in IFC format, virtual scenarios can be faster designed to carry out safety audits with driving simulators. As a result, the editing, programming, and processing times were substantially reduced using the proposed IFC exchange file format through a BIM (Building Information Modeling) model. This methodology facilitates cost-savings, execution, and optimization resources in road safety analysis.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 5050
Author(s):  
Jiahai Tan ◽  
Ming Gao ◽  
Kai Yang ◽  
Tao Duan

Road extraction from remote sensing images has attracted much attention in geospatial applications. However, the existing methods do not accurately identify the connectivity of the road. The identification of the road pixels may be interfered with by the abundant ground such as buildings, trees, and shadows. The objective of this paper is to enhance context and strip features of the road by designing UNet-like architecture. The overall method first enhances the context characteristics in the segmentation step and then maintains the stripe characteristics in a refinement step. The segmentation step exploits an attention mechanism to enhance the context information between the adjacent layers. To obtain the strip features of the road, the refinement step introduces the strip pooling in a refinement network to restore the long distance dependent information of the road. Extensive comparative experiments demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other methods, achieving an overall accuracy of 98.25% on the DeepGlobe dataset, and 97.68% on the Massachusetts dataset.


Author(s):  
Mirjam Lanzer ◽  
Martin Baumann

So far, research on pedestrians’ gaze behavior while crossing roads has mainly focused on individual pedestrians rather than groups. However, pedestrians often travel in groups especially in downtown areas. This observational study investigated how group characteristics (group size and movement of the group), situational factors (presence of traffic), and demographic variables (age and gender) influence pedestrians’ gaze behavior towards traffic during road crossing. A total of N = 197 pedestrians were observed of whom n = 24 traveled alone, n = 128 traveled in groups of two or three, and n = 45 traveled in groups of four or more. Results indicated that with increasing group size, the odds to observe traffic decreased. Diffusion of responsibility among group members might explain this effect. Finally, pedestrians’ group characteristics should be considered when developing automated vehicles that interact with vulnerable road users.


Author(s):  
Ângela Guimarães Pereira

In this study a route is defined as the path that a linear structure or facility follows in the terrain. Linear structures comprise facilities such as roads, motorways, railways, pipelines, electrical power lines, and telephone cables, each of these structures requiring specific technical parameters in what concerns the geometry of the path and having different effects on the terrain they traverse. Amongst these structures, roads and motorways are the group that creates the greatest overall impact; accordingly Portuguese legislation requires an environmental impact assessment (EIA) process as part of the necessary licensing approval. Usually the alternative (or alternatives) that undergo the EIA process is justified in terms of technical and economical issues. The result is that if major environmental impacts are identified by the EIA study, a myriad of mitigation measures are proposed, very seldom the redesign of the path being carried out (Guimarães Pereira & Antunes, 1996). Preliminary studies that precede the implementation of these types of projects are technically detailed and often come together with economical feasibility studies, shelving environmental issues for later assessment. In the methodology proposed in this chapter a multidimensional evaluation methodology, multicriteria evaluation, will be combined with the robustness of a search methodology, genetic algorithms (GAs) to generate alternative road routes that take into consideration environmental, economical, technical, and social criteria. These criteria are referenced to the physical space where the road is to be placed and therefore this methodology is embedded into a geographic information system (GIS). Genetic algorithms are particularly attractive to apply to multi-modal problems, allowing the exploration of spatial features to eventually find “best compromise” alternatives because these algorithms proceed their search by maintaining a population of solutions, that they can simultaneously exploit for their efficiency.1 Moreover, the particular mixing mechanism provides the means to recombine solutions and explore the search space. The remainder of this chapter describes evolutionary modeling of road routes, in particular the coding onto a GA of the geometric algorithm that accounts for the technical aspects of motorway siting. The details of the implementation of the MCDA-GA methodology, running within the GIS GRASS 4.1 (Geographic Resources Analysis Support System) and its application to generate and evaluate alternative routes of a section of a Portuguese complementary itinerary (IC7) will be presented.


2020 ◽  
Vol 223 (20) ◽  
pp. jeb228460
Author(s):  
Glenna T. Clifton ◽  
David Holway ◽  
Nicholas Gravish

ABSTRACTMany walking insects use vision for long-distance navigation, but the influence of vision on rapid walking performance that requires close-range obstacle detection and directing the limbs towards stable footholds remains largely untested. We compared Argentine ant (Linepithema humile) workers in light versus darkness while traversing flat and uneven terrain. In darkness, ants reduced flat-ground walking speeds by only 5%. Similarly, the approach speed and time to cross a step obstacle were not significantly affected by lack of lighting. To determine whether tactile sensing might compensate for vision loss, we tracked antennal motion and observed shifts in spatiotemporal activity as a result of terrain structure but not illumination. Together, these findings suggest that vision does not impact walking performance in Argentine ant workers. Our results help contextualize eye variation across ants, including subterranean, nocturnal and eyeless species that walk in complete darkness. More broadly, our findings highlight the importance of integrating vision, proprioception and tactile sensing for robust locomotion in unstructured environments.


1973 ◽  
Vol 187 (1) ◽  
pp. 354-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
N. P. Smith

Cross-winds increase in importance as more motorways are built; measurements made with an instrumented car in windy conditions on motorways are described. It is demonstrated that wind patterns and the occurrence of most gusts are dependent on the topography and features, such as bridges and cuttings, adjacent to the road. The relative importance of the various gust-causing features is enumerated and typical gusts, measured near these features, are shown. The value of artificial cross-winds is discussed, with particular reference to the realism of the M.I.R.A. facility.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document