Comparative Safety Assessment of Vehicle–Pedestrian Interactions at Urban Arterial and Highway Using UAV Data

According to the WHO Global Road Safety Report [10] and the MoRTH Accident Report [12], fatal road accidents involving pedestrians are increasing yearly. The primary factor contributing to these rising statistics is vehicle speed, which calls for a thorough examination of the overall situation. The current study compares the interactions between vehicles and pedestrians on two separate roadway facilities in Gujarat, India, with varying vehicle speeds and pedestrian behavior characteristics. This study compares the severity of interactions at the two roadway facilities, which is primarily based on speed and safety analysis. An automatic trajectory extractor is used to retrieve the speeds and Time to Collision (TTC) of both the entities involved in interactions. It was observed that the pedestrians keep a higher distance from the interacting vehicle on National Highway (NH) because of the higher speed of the interacting vehicles. The present study revealed that although Time-to-Collision (TTC) is lower in urban settings, and higher on National Highways even than fatality rates are significantly higher on National Highways due to elevated vehicular speeds. This underscores the complex relationship between speed, collision risk, and outcome severity. A new risk factor is introduced as the fatality risk Index to assess the overall risk of different traffic facilities. This study can work as a means to measure the safety of different traffic facilities and develop safer options for the movement of pedestrians across different facilities involving interaction between vehicles and pedestrians.