Study on Pedestrian Risk Exposure at Unsignalized Intersection in a Country with Extreme Vehicle Heterogeneity and Poor Lane Discipline

Abstract

The pedestrian is an integral element in the urban road infrastructure. Extreme vehicle heterogeneity, poor lane discipline, lack of adequate infrastructure, and road users’ poor understanding of the right-of-way and yielding make Indian roads extremely dangerous for pedestrians, especially at intersections. Since motorists, in general, do not yield to pedestrians at unsignalized intersections, pedestrians are forced to wait. When the waiting time exceeds a particular threshold, a pedestrian may attempt an unsafe crossing by accepting rolling gaps. The motivation behind this research paper was to understand the effect of waiting time on pedestrian rolling gap acceptance behavior at unsignalized intersections in India under heterogeneous traffic. This paper presents a study on pedestrian crossing behavior at unsignalized intersections in an urban traffic environment that used the survival analysis approach. The field data were collected from six sites in the city of Kanpur, India. The results show that rolling gap acceptance behavior is affected by various factors, such as pedestrian demographic characteristics, approaching vehicle features, and pedestrian group composition. Male pedestrians behave more aggressively and undertake unsafe street crossings. When pedestrians are part of a group, they do not accept rolling gaps easily. One interesting finding of the study is that when the approaching vehicle type is a two-wheeler or when vehicles are not in a platoon, the probability of accepting a rolling gap decreases.