Abstract
Personal mobility vehicles (PMVs) are emerging as an eco-friendly transport mode in urban environments. Under current law, PMVs are prohibited on shared sidewalks and public areas in East Asian urban environments mainly due to safety concerns. Few previous studies have explored safety issues related to PMV and pedestrian mixed traffic through controlled experiments. One critical limitation of experiment-based approaches is the difficulty in considering critical or risky scenarios mainly because of safety and ethical issues. Thus, simulation-based approaches may be more appealing in overcoming such difficulties and evaluating different scenarios. In this paper, a social force based microscopic simulation model, which has already been calibrated for PMV-pedestrian mixed traffic, is utilized to evaluate safe avoidance distance of pedestrians in PMV-pedestrian mixed traffic situations. Data collected through controlled experiments are also used to validate the simulation based findings and discussions reported in this paper.
