In France, about 800 pedestrians are killed and over 17,000 are injured each year. There is a prevalence of these data in urban areas where the traffic is denser and the interaction between drivers and pedestrians is more complex. This can be exemplified by considering the risk taken by a pedestrian situated at a crossroads and willing to cross. This particular situation is indeed highly complex as the loop perception-decision-action is involved. This paper is aimed at establishing a state of the art on the topic behavioral considerations of pedestrians crossing at crossroads. The purpose of this review is twofold. First, the issues of the behavior of a pedestrian at a crossroads will be defined precisely. We will focus our work on the tactical level described by Michon (1985). This level deals with the choice of actions to operate in the current situational context. Basically, we will ask ourselves what factors influence the decision to cross the street. We will consider psychologically based models to investigate the nature of the processes involved in that cognitively costly task. We will include both perceptual factors (e.g., Langham & Moberly, 2003) and high level processes (e.g., Chu, Guttenplan & Baltes, 2004). Second, we will show how understanding this behavior is fundamental for road users' safety; an experiment will be described that will answer these objectives. For the covering abstract see ITRD E138091. This paper is available from http://www.ictct.org/workshops/07-Beijing/14Tom4454.pdf.
Abstract