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Drivers’ Yielding Behavior in Different Pedestrian Crossing Configurations: A Field Survey

Although in recent years road victims have been reported to decrease, the growing number of pedestrians involved in road accidents still remains a social concern. This work analyzes the drivers’ behavior in approach to two different configurations of pedestrian zebra crossing: marked by (1) white stripes over the pavement (named “white zebra crossing”) and (2) white stripes on a red-colored pavement (named “red and white zebra crossing”). Even though the latter configuration is nowadays quite widespread on urban environment, there is no scientific evidence of its actual effectiveness in conditioning drivers’ yielding behavior. This study was aimed at verifying the effectiveness of the red and white zebra crossing on improving road safety at pedestrian crossings. A set of synchronized cameras were used to record drivers’ behavior while approaching the pedestrian crossings. By reconstructing the speed profile of each surveyed driver (309 in total), it was possible to analyze the driver-pedestrian interaction. Data were used to study the driver yielding behavior, to analyze how it is affected by vehicle dynamic constraints, and to identify the significant explanatory variables of a logistic regression model for predicting the drivers’ likelihood of yielding the pedestrian on the different crossing configurations. As a result, significant differences in terms of yielding behavior on the two pedestrian crossing configurations were observed: a higher yielding rate (about 20% higher) and a higher tendency to yield to the pedestrian were reported for the red and white zebra crossing, especially for the most critical conditions of driver-pedestrian interaction. Moreover, the analysis of yielding behavior with respect to vehicle dynamics constraints highlighted that drivers approaching the red and white zebra crossing experienced more opportunities to yield. As a confirmation, logistic regression model showed that the yielding likelihood is significantly and positively affected by the presence of the red and white zebra crossing configuration.