United States Department of Transportation
i
Do prohibitive warnings improve road-crossing Safety for texting and non-texting pedestrians?
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2017-06-01
[PDF-669.17 KB]
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Abstract:Pedestrian injuries and deaths caused by collisions with motor vehicles are a major health problem in the U.S. [1]. In 2013 alone, 4,735 pedestrians were killed and 66,000 were injured in traffic crashes. Both field observations and controlled experiments indicate that distraction from mobile device use is a significant risk factor for pedestrian injuries. Despite the importance of the problem, relatively little is known about effective interventions to reduce the harmful effects of mobile device use on pedestrian road crossing behavior. The goal of this project was to investigate how mobile devices can be used to assist pedestrians in making safe road crossings. We developed a cell phone app that warns pedestrians when they initiate unsafe crossings and tested the app in our state-of-the-art pedestrian simulator. The project expands on our first SAFER-SIM grant that investigated permissive alerts (ones that indicate when it is safe to cross). We found that texting pedestrians who were given permissive alerts took safer gaps than those without these alerts. However, they also paid much less attention to the traffic, relying on the alert system to identify when it was safe to cross. The current project investigated prohibitive alerts (ones that indicate when it is unsafe to cross). We hypothesized that prohibitive alerts will lead to safer gap choices for texting pedestrians without the decrease in visual attention to traffic that we found with permissive alerts. The results inform the design of Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) communication systems based on dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) technologies being incorporated into vehicles.
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