Analyzing interactions between pedestrians and motor vehicles at two-phase signalized intersections-an explorative study combining traffic behaviour and traffic conflict observations in a cross-national context

Abstract

Traffic safety has mainly been studied using crash data, which have some important shortcomings, including random variation because of the low number of crashes, underreporting and the limited availability of behavioural and situational aspects about the crashes. Therefore, there is a need for surrogate safety measures. Observational studies do not suffer from the aforementioned limitations, and can contribute to the understanding of the complex way road users interact. This study explores the road safety at two-phase signalized intersections in a cross-national context by applying conflict and behavioural observations at three intersections in Sweden and Belgium. Variables collected are for instance the number of pedestrians, age and gender of involved road users and behavioural aspects like yielding behaviour and looking behaviour. Additionally, the Swedish Traffic Conflict Technique has been applied to collect information about traffic conflicts at one Belgian and one Swedish two-phase signalized intersection. Generalizability of the results of this explorative research cannot be claimed. However, some interesting issues and hypotheses arose that should be analyzed into more detail. Red light violation was much more prevalent among the pedestrians at the Swedish intersection compared to the Belgian intersections. At the Swedish intersection, violating the red light is independent of the presence of a vehicle, which indicates that pedestrians do not only violate the red light when no vehicles are present. In addition, it has been found that pedestrians who do not look before they cross the signalized intersection have an increased risk to get involved in a traffic conflict.