Safety Effectiveness Evaluation of Raised Pedestrian Crossings in Ho Chi Minh City

Abstract

Traffic crashes are one of the immediate and long-term serious problems all over the world including Vietnam. Speed is one of the direct causes of a crash. In recent years, Ho Chi Minh City has synchronously implemented many measures to manage speed, in particular, a pilot implementation of raised pedestrian crossing measures at many locations in the city. Technical efficiency assessment of this measure is necessary to help the city build more scientific evidence for scaling up successful measures. This study was conducted at four locations on Ton Duc Thang Street, District 1, with four vehicle groups including motorbikes, cars, trucks, and buses. The results indicate that this measure had a positive effect on V85 speed with four group of vehicles at 35.5km/h or more. The effectiveness was stronger for greater widths of raised pedestrian crossing i.e., more effective at 10.5m of raised pedestrian crossings width than 7.5m. This measure reduces V85 speed of vehicles by nearly 14% on 10.5m of raised pedestrian crossings width, and positive impacts are highest for cars (13.93%), and lowest for trucks (6.54%). While traffic volume and the surrounding context may impact on the result, they are not considered in this study. These results provide important scientific evidence for scaling up this measure city wide in the future.