Towards the pedestrian delay estimation at intersections under vehicular platoon caused conflicts

This paper attempts to develop a pedestrian delay estimation model for intersections considering automobile-pedestrian conflicts induced by driver's bad behaviour of not giving way to pedestrians. Firstly, level of service (LOS) divisions for signalized and unsignalized intersection crosswalks for pedestrians in China are proposed and 6 levels are ranked using the pedestrians' perceptions of comfort, safety and psychological limitation as well as acceptable delay. Then pedestrian delay is analyzed at non-signalized intersection and signalized intersection, and the latter is divided into two parts: signal delay and interrupted delay based on whether pedestrian signal and vehicle signal are separated thoroughly. For the case of signal control, delay estimation model is constructed with pedestrian gathering and dissipating characteristics. In order to test the effectiveness of this proposed delay estimation model, we use Vissim to simulate the pedestrian delay at signalized and unsignalized intersections. Compared with the simulated delay, the delay values derived from this proposed model has better performance of EI (error indicator) in response to the observed ones, providing useful reference in improving pedestrian crossing environment at intersections. © 2010 Academic Journals.