The visibility of pedestrians has been measured in a full-scale field experiment. The visibility was quantified by the detection distance to pedestrian who is about to cross a street. Six subjects, sitting as passengers in a Volvo, were used for registering the detection distances. Two pedestrians were standing on the pavement along a street and the subject’s only task was to push a button when they could detect a pedestrian. The test site was located in an industrial area with no or little traffic, and consequently, the measurements could be accomplished without any disturbance from oncoming vehicles. Four illumination conditions were used: 100 % or 65 % of full effect on every light source, 100 % on every second light source, the others switched off, and finally no road lighting at all. In these lighting conditions the average luminance of the road surface turned out to be 1.0; 0.5 and 0.0 cd/m2 with the luminance uniformity 0.4. Furthermore, the luminance uniformity was 0.4 and 0.0 at the average luminance 0.5 cd/m2 . The clothing of the pedestrian was either light-grey or black. The pedestrian’s position along the road was either 5 metres behind a light source or half-way between two light sources. Every subject registered every condition two or four times. The independent variables were lighting condition, clothing and position along the road. The only dependent variable was the detection distance. (Author/publisher) This report may be accessed by Internet users at http://www.vti.se/en/publications/the-influence-of-road-lighting-on-the…
Abstract