Effects of Refuge Island Settings on Pedestrian Safety Perception and Signal Violation at Signalized Intersections

Pedestrians are the most vulnerable road users and great efforts have been made to find out countermeasures to improve pedestrian safety. One of the most widely accepted countermeasure is to install pedestrian refuge island, which has been proved to improve pedestrian safety at non-signalized crosswalks, especially at mid-block crossings, but some researchers also pointed out its adverse effects at signalized crosswalks. In order to explore the underlying mechanism how refuge islands impact pedestrians’ perception as well as their behaviors, the paper focuses on finding out important influencing factors related to refuge island settings and analyzing their effects explicitly. Intercept survey on pedestrians’ safety perception and video observation was carried out at four crosswalks in Shanghai, China. Random-effects ordered logistic model and binary logistic models are adopted to model pedestrians’ safety perception and signal violation, respectively. The model has revealed that installation of a refuge island can provide pedestrians with better safety perception, wider refuge island stimulates more pedestrians to cross on red from curbside, but meanwhile it can keep more pedestrians waiting at the median instead of violating signal for the second crossing part. Besides, it has been found that pedestrians are more likely to cross on red from curbside if signal indication for the second crossing part is green, especially if signal heads set at curbside and refuge island are non-staggered. The preliminary conclusions can provide evidences to improve planning, design and operation of refuge islands.For example, most of the existing guidelines only paid attention on the lower limit of refuge island width, but the fact is not the wider the better. It is necessary to optimize refuge island width with consideration of pedestrian volume, signal timing scheme etc., and try to make trade-off between good safety perception and low violation rate.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF10 Standing Committee on Pedestrians.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Cao, Yingying
  • Ni, Ying
  • Li, Keping
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Photos; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 16p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Countermeasures; Crosswalks; Pedestrian safety; Perception; Signalized intersections; Traffic islands; Traffic violations
• Uncontrolled Terms: Intercept surveys
• Geographic Terms: Shanghai (China)
• Subject Areas: Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01623124
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-04090
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 24 2017 3:15PM