Level of Safety and Crossing Warrants for Crosswalks Using Surrogate Safety Measures

Abstract

Pedestrians are the most vulnerable road users and they are highly susceptible to conflicts at midblock crosswalk locations. They are prone to a higher risk of injury on the incident of vehicular impact and their decision making behaviour at unmarked crosswalks are more crucial than at marked crosswalks. The objective of the current study is to determine the Level of Safety thresholds and warrants for both marked and unmarked pedestrian crossing facilities at urban midblock sections under mixed traffic conditions. In this study, data were collected from four different locations of Trivandrum city including marked and unmarked crosswalks. Crossing behaviour of pedestrians for both types of crosswalks were compared by analyzing different characteristics such as gap acceptance, surrogate safety measure like post encroachment time (PET), waiting time, crossing time, platoon size, type of critical vehicle and critical gap. Multiple linear regression (MLR) technique was used to develop gap acceptance models. The study also proposes Pedestrian Level of Safety (PLS) criteria which describes the safety of pedestrians at crosswalks and warrants for crossings based on the PET values. The developed PLS thresholds and the pedestrian vehicle interaction values (PV2) were correlated to the PET values to develop the pedestrian crossing warrants.