Assessment of different pedestrian communication strategies for improving driver behavior at marked crosswalks on free channelized right turns.

INTRODUCTION: Previous studies have indicated low driver yielding rates to pedestrians in various countries. This study analyzed four different strategies to improve driver yielding rates at marked crosswalks on channelized right turn lanes at signalized intersections. METHOD: A sample of 5,419 drivers was collected for four gestures using field experiments for males and females in the State of Qatar. The experiments were conducted in daytime and nighttime on weekends at three different locations; two sites are located in an urban area and the third is located in non-urban area. The effect of pedestrians' and drivers' demographic characteristics, gestures, approach speed, time of the day, location of the intersection, car type, and driver distractions on yielding behavior is investigated using logistic regression analysis. RESULTS: It was found that for the base gesture, only 2.00% of drivers yielded to the pedestrians, while for hand, attempt, and vest-attempt gestures the yielding percentages were considerably higher, 12.81%, 19.59%, and 24.60%, respectively. The results also showed that females received significantly higher yielding rates compared to males. In addition, the probability of a driver yielding increased 2.8 times when drivers approached at slower speed compared to a higher speed. Further, drivers' age group, accompanied, and distractions were not significant in determining drivers' probability of yielding.

Road safety status during COVID-19 pandemic: exploring public and road safety expert's opinions.

The main objective of this study is to investigate the status of traffic safety and the public perception of traffic safety during the during COVID-19 pandemic. Three different data sets are used in this study: road crash and traffic violation data from Qatar, and two separate questionnaire surveys (from general public and road safety experts). Results showed that during COVID-19 period, the total number of crashes in Qatar significantly reduced during the pandemic compared with the previous 5 years. However, the rates of serious and fatal injuries significantly increased. Regarding the general public perceptions, more than 80% reported that roads became safer while driving behaviours improved during the pandemic. On the other hand, more than 50% of the experts disagreed that roads became safer, 55% disagreed that driving behaviours improved and 70% agreed that less attention from governments was directed toward road safety during the pandemic. The findings from this study could help policy makers to understand the road safety status during the pandemic to make appropriate adjustments in the traffic laws and regulations on a temporary basis. This could help in reducing crash-related injuries and as a result reduce pressure on health and other emergency services.

A novel agent-based framework for evaluating pedestrian safety at unsignalized mid-block crosswalks.

A critical safety problem in road networks is the conflicts on unsignalized crosswalks. Thus, a proactive approach to assess pedestrian safety performance is required. Simulating the microscopic road user behavior in a virtual platform is one of the typical approaches. However, current simulation tools are not flexible enough to properly reproduce various behaviors of pedestrians and drivers considering their interactions with the road environment and other road users. Therefore, the objective of this paper is to propose a novel agent-based framework for evaluating pedestrian safety at unsignalized crosswalks. Unsignalized mid-block crosswalks with refuge islands (UMCR) are considered as an example facility to implement the proposed framework, where relevant behavioral elements such as the reaction time, visual field with obstacles, and minimum safety margin time are addressed. Not only the pedestrian-vehicle interaction is modeled but also the vehicle-vehicle interaction is considered. Empirical validation on a UMCR shows that the proposed framework can reproduce reliable distributions of the post encroachment time compared to the observed distributions within an acceptable error range. The sensitivity analysis reveals that the high reaction time of drivers, small safety margin time, and visual obstacles near crosswalks increase the probability of serious conflicts. The results also show that the framework can reproduce traffic crashes under assumed extreme road conditions.