The Reasonable Distance Of Crosswalks Based On Efficiency And Safety

With the development of economy and society, urban traffic problem has been paid to more and more attention. Walking is an important way as urban traffic, even irreplaceable in some cases. Pedestrians are in the municipal transportation important component, also are "disadvantaged groups" in the traffic environment, especially in crosswalk, and crosswalk is an important component in the pedestrian street facility. When pedestrians need to cross through the crosswalk, if satisfying the pedestrian free street request, it will inevitably harm the safety of pedestrians, and simultaneously affect the vehicles travel smoothly. How to alleviate conflict between pedestrians and vehicles on the road? How to raise pedestrian crossing efficiency and vehicles operating efficiency? It has the vital significance to establishment the reasonable distance of crosswalk. The paper studies vehicle and pedestrian traffic characteristics based on a grant from the Major State Basic Research Development Program of China (973 Program) (No. 2005CB724205), propose the relevant reasonable distances. Then the traffic flow efficiency and pedestrian safety are improved based on these two aspects.The paper studies the characteristics of traffic flow in crosswalk. It analyzes the mutual disturbance process of vehicle and pedestrian qualitatively. It analyzes the pedestrian movement characteristics, psychological characteristics as well as the efficiency. Base on theoretical analysis, the paper does actual observation and analysis of the test data on the basis of above theoretical analysis according to actual situation of crosswalk in HEPING Road near the Gate of Wuhan University of Technology. It analyzes the rule of pedestrian arriving at the crosswalk, the characteristics of pedestrian velocity and the Passing vehicle. Under the VISSIM software environment, build the model of pedestrian and vehicle affecting mutually, obtain the related evaluating index of traveling capability, vehicular delay and pedestrian delay and conflicts. To get the traffic flow stability through computing the largest Lyapunov index by Matlab, also get the quantity of pedestrian crossing street based on the characteristics of traffic flow. Analyze correlation coefficients among all indexes, find that it isn't impossible to obtain optimum value under some distance, then need to consider the road management function.After generalized analysis, obtain the safety, efficiency and stability demand of different road, chose the multi-objective decision making method to determine the balance point among the safety, efficiency and the stability, then finally determine the reasonable distance of crosswalk under all road conditions. The study findings have certain significance to improving stability, safety and efficiency of pedestrian.