Publication Detail

Safety Effects of the Yellow Light Border (YPB) Pedestrian Signal: An Evaluation (or An Empirical Study on Crossing Behavior at a Signalized Intersection with High-Volume Pedestrians)

UCD-ITS-RR-20-107

Research Report

Suggested Citation:
Zhang, Michael and Sarder Rafee Musabbir (2020) Safety Effects of the Yellow Light Border (YPB) Pedestrian Signal: An Evaluation (or An Empirical Study on Crossing Behavior at a Signalized Intersection with High-Volume Pedestrians). Center for Transportation, Environment, and Community Health

This study focuses on the pedestrian crossing behavior (individual or group), vehicle yielding action, and possible factors contributing to the conflict at the tourist location (signalized T-intersection) with high volume of pedestrian and traffic. Several attributes including pedestrian demographics (age, gender, etc.), crossing behavior (waiting time, crossing speed, etc.), and motorist characteristics (waiting time, yielding, etc.) are considered for the empirical analysis. The dataset contains 327 manually extracted events including 500 pedestrians recorded from the video cameras placed at signal poles to focus on the crosswalk interaction behavior. Out of these events, 246 are conflicts and the other 81 include regular and unique crossing behavior. Several models including binary logit, ordered logit and multinomial logit are formulated to analyze pedestrian crossing behavior, vehicle yielding action, and interaction process coupled with conflict, yielding, and pedestrian behavioral class. The primary findings include: (i) vehicles will more likely yield to an aggressive (violating) pedestrian; (ii) vehicle involved in a right-turning conflict will more likely yield to pedestrian during green period; (iii) vehicle will more likely yield to baggagecarrying pedestrian during pedestrian’s green; (iv) longer waiting period tend to make motorists impatient and search for gap, resulting in pedestrians’ yielding; (v) male pedestrians tend to be more aggressive in crossing as opposed to female pedestrians; (vi) pedestrians crossing in a group are likely to yield to turning vehicles.

Key words: pedestrian crossing behavior, vehicle yielding, signalized intersection, conflict