Using connected vehicle technology to deliver timely warnings to pedestrians.
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2016-07-01
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Abstract:Pedestrian injuries and deaths caused by collisions with motor vehicles are on the
rise in the U.S. One factor that may increase the risk of such collisions is pedestrian
mobile device use. Both field observations and controlled experiments indicate that
pedestrian road-crossing behavior is impaired by texting or talking on a mobile device.
Despite the importance of the problem, relatively little is known about effective
interventions to reduce the harmful effects of mobile device use on pedestrian roadcrossing
behavior. The goal of this project was to use connected vehicles technology to
deliver warnings to pedestrians via their mobile devices. To safely and systematically
study this problem, we conducted an experiment in a large-screen immersive virtual
environment to evaluate how texting pedestrians respond to permissive traffic alerts
delivered via their cell phone. We developed a cell phone app that delivered information
to texting pedestrians about when traffic conditions permit safe crossing. We compared
gap selection and movement timing in three groups of pedestrians: texting, texting with
alerts, and no texting (control). Participants in the control and alert groups chose larger
gaps and were more discriminating in their gap choices than participants in the texting
group. Both the control and alert groups had more time to spare than the texting group
when they exited the roadway even though the alert group timed their entry relative to
the lead car less tightly than the control and texting groups. By choosing larger gaps,
participants in the alert group were able to compensate for their poorer timing of entry,
resulting in a margin of safety that did not differ from those who were not texting.
However, they also relied heavily on the alert system and paid less attention to the
roadway. The project demonstrates both the potential and the potential pitfalls of
assistive technologies based on Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communications
technology for mitigating pedestrian–motor vehicle crashes.
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