Institute of Transportation, MOTC

Road safety of elderly pedestrians is now an important issue in Taiwan. Old pedestrians are more fragile in complicated road-crossing tasks. Due to their poor fitness, cognition and perception, old pedestrians tend to misjudge the situation and accept gaps too small. In this paper, we are going to present how Motor Imagery (MI) effects on road crossing safety. Human with better MI ability were expected to make safer choice in road crossing tasks.
In the research, 82 participants, includes 42 old and 40 young, were involved in the experiment, which would test their walking time, MI, time-to-arrival (TTA) estimation ability, and gap acceptance with the safety margin and proportion of safe crossing. Hints for time-to-arrival are also included to provide a solution for the problem.
Older participants were proved that they are easier to make unsafe choices than the youngers, due to their longer walking time, worse ability of MI and TTA, acceptance to small gaps and long decision time. In addition, the positive effect on decision making with time hint was in the result.
In the conclusion, we suggest that recognizing should be an important part of old pedestrians’ safety education. Besides, supporting facilities, such as hint of time, would also be helpful for making safe crossing choice.