Threshold research on the elderly pedestrian ratio in pedestrian crossing speed setting on signalized crosswalks in China

Abstract

Inadequate consideration of the elderly people crossing demand on the signalized intersections would bring great potential safety hazards, especially the speed through the crosswalk. By observing the pedestrian walking speed at three signalized crosswalks and a relatively spacious sidewalk in Chongqing, China, this paper has obtained the walking speed values of 658 elderly people and 1,176 adults at the signalized crosswalks, as well as the walking speed parameters of 868 adults and 422 elderly people on a relatively spacious sidewalk section. Comparing the walking speed of adults walking along the sidewalk section and on signalized crosswalks, the data show that there is no significant difference between these two site speeds. Similarly, when comparing the two site data of the elderly, it is found that their walking speed at the signalized crosswalk is significantly higher than that on the sidewalk section. That is to say, the speed setting for the old people crossing the crosswalk has not been fully considered. Subsequently, taking the elderly’s walking speed as input parameter, establishing the simulation models under different proportions of the elderly and different pedestrian flows, and then gain the walking speed values of the pedestrians with different quantities and different proportion of the elderly pedestrians. With the help of the unknown breakpoint Regression method, under the setting of the elderly pedestrian speed crossing the street, the proportion threshold of the elderly crossing the street at the signalized intersection is obtained. The results show that when the proportion of the elderly is more than 15% of the pedestrians crossing the street, the pedestrian crossing speed value for the signal time is suggested to be 0.97 m/s.