UNDERSTANDING THE EFFECTS OF TRAFFIC CALMING DEVICES ON ROAD USERS AT UNCONTROLLED MID-BLOCK CROSSWALKS USING SUMO

Abstract

Pedestrians, bicyclists, and motorcyclists are the most prone to accidents on roads and hence, are commonly known as Vulnerable Road Users (VRUs). The risk of accidents gets increases on the unprotected mid-block crosswalks in urban areas because of many reasons, such as heterogeneity of traffic having a high volume. Thus, ensuring safety in such settings is very crucial, and understanding pedestrian-vehicle interaction is also vital in such facilities. This study aims to understand the safety of pedestrians at an uncontrolled mid-block location with the help of deceleration rate to avoid a collision (DRAC) as a surrogate safety measure using micro-simulation software SUMO. The effect of various parameters such as age, gender, group-effect, distraction, rolling crossing behaviour, driver yielding, etc., on the speed and waiting time of pedestrians are studied. The main crossing lane is introduced as the lane at which the last conflicting vehicle was there when the pedestrian had just started crossing. The effect of waiting time, pedestrian speed, and the total number of conflicting vehicles while pedestrians are waiting is also studied on the main crossing lane. The study concluded that while waiting at the median, the pedestrians started crossing the road when the last conflicting vehicle was on the near lane. The study also concluded that the 10 m region near the crosswalk is critical to studying the safety of pedestrians. Using SUMO, two scenarios are generated. One is for speed hump, and another is for the textured pavement to study the effectiveness of these traffic calming devices. Very little research has been conducted on textured pavement, so there is a need to study the effect of textured pavement as a traffic-calming measure. The study also concluded that the textured pavement is a more efficient traffic calming measure than a speed hump in terms of reducing the speed of vehicles and increasing their yielding behaviour. The study can be extended to study the effect of pedestrian pelican signals on the safety of pedestrians and driver yielding behaviour.