Several factors influence a pedestrians decision to use or not to use a crosswalk to cross a street. The presence of a crosswalk and its proximityto the pedestrians trip origin or destination, and traffic volume on thestreet, play a key role in this decision making process. In this paper, the pedestrians yielding behavior to motorists and the behavior of pedestrians trapped in the middle of a street while crossing are analyzed. Both of these behaviors were observed for pedestrians crossing at a crosswalk, and for those crossing away from a crosswalk. Further, yielding behavior ofpedestrians at intersections and midblock locations was also analyzed. Data collected at 11 intersections and 5 midblock locations were considered for analysis. First, hypotheses were established to study if the yielding and the crossing behavior of pedestrians were different at each site. Second, the significance of both yielding behavior of pedestrians and those pedestrians trapped in the middle of the street while crossing were tested for all sites. A binomial test for two proportions was used to test the statistical significance of the difference considering data for all 16 sites.A non-parametric test, the Wilcoxon signed rank test, was also used to validate the result obtained from the test for two proportions. The results show that pedestrians crossing at a crosswalk are more likely to yield to motorists and are less likely to be trapped in the middle of the street than those who cross away from a crosswalk. These results are statistically significant at a 95 percent level of confidence.
Abstract