Pedestrian's Psychology on Gap Selecting when Crossing Street

The research of pedestrian's gap selecting behavior will contribute to improving the understanding of pedestrian's psychology and behavior, which is important to improve pedestrian's safety. There is little consideration on pedestrian's crossing time on published papers. This paper analyzes the process of pedestrian's street-crossing, proposes a new method of data-extracting from video. Firstly, discuss the process of pedestrian's gap crossing. Secondly, analyzes the psychological process of pedestrian's gap selecting. Thirdly, analyze pedestrian's time gap and safety margin, and explain the method to extract correlative data from video. Finally, analyze the influence factors of pedestrian's gap selecting, including pedestrian's gender, age, violating of traffic rules, crossing fellows, signal control, vehicle's distance and speed. The results show that pedestrian's safety margin time is the vital factor that determine pedestrian's gap selecting behavior. Pedestrian's safety margin time is very useful to analyze the influence factor of their behavior. Some of the results indicate that children and the elderly need larger gaps than youth, and it is safer to cross street with fellows. The results also show that it is more risky to cross street during red man and pedestrian's decision-making is decided by vehicle's speed rather than the distance to conflict while crossing none-signal-controlled crosswalk.