PEDESTRIAN CROSSING BEHAVIOUR AT SIGNALISED CROSSINGS

Town centres are often characterised by large pedestrian flows. Historically, traffic signal control has sought to optimise vehicle flows, sometimes with priority for public transport, while pedestrian flows have been fitted around the vehicle flows. A typical example of this is the staggered pedestrian crossing, which splits the pedestrian crossing movement into two movements allowing the green time lost to vehicles to be minimised at the expense of delay incurred by pedestrians who (if they comply) wait on a traffic island. This raises two issues: significant numbers of pedestrians fail to comply with the detour and delay involved in a staggered pedestrian crossing, leading to unsafe crossing behaviour; and where the primary function of a junction is to allow pedestrians to cross, local authorities may well wish to shift priority from vehicles to pedestrians. This study aims to explain pedestrian behaviour around traffic signals, and gives guidelines to promote pedestrian safety and safer design of traffic control systems. The study also investigates pedestrian perceptions under different crossing situations and their route choice around traffic signals. Finally, this work feeds into the development of a traffic signal control mechanism which takes into account pedestrian route choice and their behaviour in determining optimum settings. Recently the UK Department for Transport (DfT) has promoted the installation of puffin pedestrian crossings which aim to decrease ambiguity for pedestrians and vehicles at conflicts and promote greater pedestrian priority. This research looks at how people respond to different types of signalised pedestrian crossings such as pelican, puffin and toucan which take varying degree of pedestrian priority into account. Observations from CCTV camera recordings of sites in the West Midlands and London (a total of 24 locations) were coupled with face to face interviews of pedestrians. In addition the pedestrians were subjected to a stated preference survey aimed to understand pedestrians' crossing behaviours when some crossing conditions change. The responses from the survey were analysed to obtain their trade offs in pedestrian behaviour under binary choice situations. In the questionnaire, attributes (variables), which influence pedestrian crossing behaviour is introduced, including status of pedestrian signal, traffic volume, characteristics of pedestrians and infrastructure of pedestrian crossing. All these attributes are used in the modelling analysis to measure pedestrians' crossing behaviour (e.g., to what extent an attribute would influence pedestrians' crossing behaviour and route choices at and around signalised intersections). A multinomial logit (MNL) model has been developed to analyse respondents' discrete choice behaviours. Preliminary results indicate that pedestrians are more compliant at traffic signals if they are accompanied by children or if their mobility is impaired or if they have heavy luggage. In most of the other cases pedestrians tend to seek gaps at traffic lights and will ignore traffic signal status. This research will lead to development of tools that can be used to design signal settings that account for pedestrian behaviour. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999