Study of Vulnerable Road-User Choices and Effect of V2P-based Alert on Crossing Behavior Through Analysis of Virtual Environment Crossing Events

Nearly 6000 pedestrian deaths occur every year in the US and many more are injured in collisions with vehicles. To improve safety of pedestrians, the goal of this study is to determine if crossing choice and jaywalk crossing behaviors could be successfully understood from data collected from participants in an immersive virtual reality simulation. After designing the experiment and collecting data from subjects, rigorous models were estimated. A Heckman selection model was used to analyze the data for a safe crossing parameter, time-to-collision, and crossing choice. The model was chosen to account for whether a crosswalk was used or the pedestrian decided to jaywalk. The study explored predictors for both crossing choice and crossing behavior of time-to-collision. Additionally, alerts were given to pedestrians to examine the impact of vehicle-to-pedestrian communication. The alert was designed to encourage a safer crossing by playing a set of natural sounds when a crossing attempt would result in a time-to-collision less than a given threshold. The alert was not directly found to be a significant predictor of higher time-to-collision. However, scenarios with the alert were found to have a significantly higher delay and time-to-collision than the baseline scenario. Another explanation is that unobserved factors or the strength of the alert could have influenced the outcome. The results are in agreement with cited literature and provides further avenues for study. Furthermore, the authors have developed a virtual reality simulation which allows collection of pedestrian behaviors and testing of novel vehicle-to-pedestrian communications.

• Record URL:
  https://annualmeeting.mytrb.org/OnlineProgram/Details/15701
• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ACH10 Standing Committee on Pedestrians.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  ,    
• Authors:
  • Harris, Laura M
  • Graves, Russell T
  • Arvin, Ramin
  • Khattak, Asad
  • Chakraborty, Subhadeep
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 100th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2021-1-5 to 2021-1-29
• Date: 2021

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; Illustrations; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 21p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Behavior; Crash avoidance systems; Pedestrian movement; Pedestrian vehicle interface; Simulation; Virtual reality; Vulnerable road users
• Subject Areas: Highways; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01764141
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: TRBAM-21-02747
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 4 2021 11:00AM