Examining the Evasive Behaviour of Pedestrians to Measure Their Degree of Vulnerabilities at Unsignalised Intersections

Pedestrian safety has become a significant problem in today’s world, and pedestrian casualties have escalated in developing countries where there are no special provisions for the movement of such vulnerable road users. The interaction between pedestrians and vehicles must be prioritised and requires extended study. Therefore, surrogate safety measures (SSMs) come in handy to find the relative spatial and temporal measures of road users under conflict. This study’s primary objective is to identify evasive action-based pedestrian safety indicators that are best suited for predicting pedestrian behaviour under mixed traffic conditions. The pedestrian’s step frequency and lateral deviation are proven useful in measuring evasive actions based on the pedestrian’s trajectory data. Furthermore, an expert-based analysis is undertaken to evaluate which evasive action-based parameters are most appropriate in identifying the severity of pedestrian safety. Hence, it was found that the lateral deviation has a more significant potential influence on severity identification than step frequency.