Pedestrian Crossing Safety Improvements: Before and After Study using Traffic Conflict Techniques

Pedestrians’ safety improvement is a key objective on mobility planning. For the purpose of improving the pedestrian safety, traditional reactive strategies based on identifying sites with high accident rate and implementation of conventional safety measures are not always effective. Moreover, crash history analysis often cannot be applied to the entire road network, since in many sites the sample size is not enough to have statistical validity, or historical crash data lose its validity due to changes in road system and/or operation. Traffic Conflict Technique (TCT) represents an efficient approach for a preventive strategy. It was developed as “surrogate measure of road safety” by using near-accident indicators based on measures of spatial and temporal proximity of road users. A conflict is defined as an observed situation in which two or more users are so close in space or time which could lead to a collision if their movements remain unchanged. The few applications of TCT on the pedestrian-vehicle conflict led the research team to evaluate an adequate measure to resume the risk in different scenarios of interaction between both actors. A new indicator of conflict, called Pedestrian Risk Index (PRI), has been developed. PRI is based on both duration time and severity of the conflict between vehicle and pedestrian. A before-after study was carried out along the crossing road in Belgida (Valencia, Spain) in order to evaluate the safety results of new traffic calming devices installed replacing zebra marked crosswalks. To measure the indicators, digital video records were used in order to optimize the analysis. The application of the Pedestrian Risk Index showed that this indicator is effective to highlight modifications in the driver behavior due to installation of different safety countermeasures at a crosswalk.