Pedestrian scramble operation (PSO) is an exclusive pedestrian signal phase where traffic on all four directions is stopped and pedestrians are allowed to make lateral as well as diagonal crossing. PSO was implemented at two intersections in the City of Calgary in May, 2008. An earlier study analyzed its effects on pedestrian violations and vehicle-pedestrian conflicts six weeks after the implementation of the scramble operation. This paper is a follow up study to determine the longer term effect of this new operation on pedestrian safety. Field observations were again taken one year after the implementation of PSO. Four Poisson regression models were developed to model the number of conflicts and violations. We found some changes in the results from the previous study conducted at the same location. Our results showed that the number of pedestrian-vehicle conflicts and pedestrian violations decreased significantly on weekdays but both pedestrianviolations and conflicts increased significantly on weekends after implementation of the scramble operation. Our analysis also revealed that 1.1% of No Right Turn on Red (NRTOR) was violated on weekdays and 3.1% of NRTOR were violated on weekends. The study also looked crashes from three years before and one year after the implementation of PSO and found no significant change in the number of crashes per year. This result is not surprisingsince none of the crashes recorded involved pedestrians.
Abstract