Investigating the Perception, Behaviour and Safety of Pedestrians Near Urban Bus Stops

The transportation facilities are used for the efficient transfer of goods and services. Even though the safety is the major concern for a transportation engineer. Among the road users, the pedestrians are the ones more vulnerable to conflicts. When conflicts occur, pedestrians came to direct impact without any protection rather than other road users such as vehicle users and passengers having some means of protection. Many studies have been done related to safety of pedestrians near intersections where the violation behaviour is more. But there is lack of study in midblock locations which was identified as the gap for study. The study mainly aimed to analyse the perception of pedestrians towards bus stop, crosswalk and sidewalk and to find out the violation behaviours while using these facilities and model creation to find out the safety of pedestrians in Kollam district at 3 selected bus stops. The data collected through questionnaire and video were used for analysis of perception of pedestrians towards each facility, violation behaviour and model creation. The modelling was done with help of IBM SPSS Statistics. The results indicated that the charging facility is one of the requirements in all the selected bus stops and the violation behaviour due to various factors were also identified. A model was also developed to predict the post encroachment time based on walking speed and waiting time of pedestrians and vehicle speed. Based on the predicted value, if it is lower than critical PET value then the bus stop location can be considered as unsafe, which requires additional safety improvements. The model given 57% predictive accuracy based on the selected attribute walking speed, waiting time and vehicle speed depending on each pedestrian behaviour, which is indicated by the R² value from multilinear regression analysis. So, there are other factors in which the post encroachment time depends which indicates the safety level of pedestrians.