It is known that elevated pedestrian crossings, refuges on pedestrian crossings, and pedestrian crossings with separate phases at traffic signal controlled intersections, all significantly reduces the number of accidents with pedestrians, while ordinary marked pedestrian crossings significantly increases the number of accidents with pedestrians. This discrepancy between measures is puzzling and calls for explanations of what really contributes to the accident increase. Can the cause of accidents at ordinary pedestrian crossings be attributed to drivers, to pedestrians, or to both? How does driver attention operate at an ordinary pedestrian crossing, and how does pedestrians' attention operate? Could driver inattention be attributed to unconscious information processing formed by implicit learning (the learning process where the organism is learning without awareness neither of what is learnt nor of the circumstances where learning takes place), be at work in this kind of conflicts between drivers and pedestrians? Ad hoc observations show that it is more likely that a pedestrian will not be present at an ordinary crossing than that some pedestrian will appear here, Could this be the base of what is implicitly learned i.e. that the driver (unconsciously) "learn" that "no pedestrian usually appears at an ordinary pedestrian crossing", and then fails to perceive and overlook a pedestrian even if he/she is present? This seems to be an international problem as one will see different additional measures at ordinary crossings from country to country, as additional markings in the driving lane and/or blinking amber light at the crossing: Is it likely that such additional measures would succeed in reducing the number of accidents? If not, is there any other alternative, or should ordinary pedestrian crossing simply be removed? For the covering abstract see ITRD E138952. This paper is available from http://www.ictct.org/workshops/06-Minsk/Vaa.pdf.
Abstract