Pedestrian Impatience and Its Impacts on Gap Acceptance Decisions at Unrestricted Crossings

抄録

The majority of vehicle-pedestrian crashes occur at unrestricted crossings which are largely functioned by the pedestrian’s gap acceptance behavior. As the waiting time increases, a pedestrian often becomes impatient and eventually accepts a shorter vehicular gap than usual increasing the crash risk. In this background, the present study proposes a novel methodology for the estimation of this pedestrian impatience. It also includes a case study where the proposed methodology was implemented based on gap acceptance/rejection decisions made by a total of 206 pedestrians with diverse attributes. The results show that with every 1-second increase in the waiting time, male and female pedestrians intend to accept a 0.07 sec and 0.03 sec shorter vehicular gap respectively. Similarly, the overall impatience of young, middle-aged, and elderly pedestrians was estimated as 0.10, 0.06, and 0.02 sec/sec respectively. However, carrying luggage was found to be an insignificant factor for pedestrian’s impatience.