Pedestrian Behaviour and Their Perceptions around Signalised Traffic Intersections (A Comparative Study across Two Cities, Birmingham UK and San Francisco, USA)

This paper describes how the understanding pedestrian behavior around traffic signals is important to promote pedestrian safety and to design safe traffic control systems. In order to evaluate the effect of infrastructure improvements one must understand the pedestrian movements and their path choices. Pedestrian behavior has a bearing on the performance of a traffic signal. Past work in signal optimization has not taken pedestrian issues explicitly into design consideration and pedestrian routing affected by traffic signals has been largely unexplored. The paper presents results of perception surveys of more than 450 pedestrians and the analysis of over 1500 pedestrian movements from comparative case study sites located in the Birmingham region, UK and San Francisco, USA. The study was aimed at understanding the factors that affect pedestrian movements and path choice around traffic signals.