| Title | Investigating the Effect of Pedestrian Refuge Islands on Pedestrian Crossing Safety at Signalized Intersections |
| Year | 2019 |
| Degree | Master |
| School | National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University Department of Transportation and Logistics Management |
| Author | Chen, Yen-Hsun |
| Summary | Recently, people pay more and more attention to environmental and safety issues. The development of human-oriented transportation make the pedestrians on the road increase. However, the poor walking environment of the pedestrians make the road full of potential risks. Pedestrians are the most vulnerable road users. They are often the more serious one in an accident. It is urgent to improve the pedestrian safety. In the past, it often used the number of accident as the indicator to assess the effectiveness of the improvement facilities. However, it is difficult to collect the high-quality crash data which pedestrians involved because of the high dispersion on space and time. It pays a lot of time and money for data collection, which makes it difficult to evaluate the safety effect of the pedestrian facility in a short time. Therefore, this study used the camera to capture the image of the pedestrian crossing and the vehicle turning at the signalized intersection, and then got the trajectory of the pedestrians and the vehicles by the image recognition. The trajectory data was used to quantify the behavior of the road users to assess the safety of pedestrian crossing. In order to assess the safety effects in a short time, this study used the cross-sectional analysis, and then established a set of evaluation framework, including four steps: First, the selection of the improve facilities; Second, explore its safety effects; Third, find the behavior indicators; Fourth, establish the links with safety. This study takes the refuge island as an example to analyze the safety effect through this assessment framework. The study establishes various behavior indicators of left turning vehicles and pedestrians to assess the safety effects of refuge island. Further, this study checked the differences in the indicators with or without refuge islands by statistical test, and compared with the different vehicle type and the different pedestrian signal time. The results show that with refuge island, it can help the vehicles slow down before and during the crosswalk, make the vehicles pass more intensively, increase the angle of the vehicle contact crosswalk, and reduce the non-yielding ratio. Finally, Post Encroachment Time was used as a safety surrogate indicator to model a Logistic regression. The model verified that the refuge island did bring positive safety effect. |
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