Modeling And Simulating Of Signalized MID-Block Crosswalk

Walking, as one of the most fundamental trip mode, serves as the beginning and end of every trip. It plays an important role in people’s daily traveling. In China, it is very common to find that pedestrians walking on the red. On one hand, these behaviors will threaten the pedestrian safety; on the other hand, the jaywalkers influence the operation efficiency. At present, the behaviors of walking against the light are always ignored by transportation professionals and engineers when design or evaluate the pedestrian facilities, which results in the unreasonable design or unreliable evaluation. Therefore, there is a necessity to analysis the pedestrian behavior elaborately and deeply and develop a reliable simulation model for pedestrian crossing at signalized crosswalk. Thus, it can be applicable to design and improve the pedestrian facilities.Based on it, this paper focus on the mid-block signalized crosswalk and investigate the pedestrian crossing behaviors and pedestrian traffic characteristics by the questionnaire survey and video investigation method. The results indicate that the pedestrians can be categorized into two types:law-obeying pedestrians and opportunistic pedestrians. Through the data analysis, the average crossing speed, the proportion of the two types of pedestrians and the arrival rate of vehicles and pedestrians are obtained.Then, a cellular automaton simulation model for pedestrian crossing at mid-block signalized crosswalk is proposed. This model takes fully consideration of the pedestrian walking through the red light and pedestrian-vehicle interaction behaviors. The model modify the typical NaSch vehicle model to multi-cells NaSch and integrates the social forces to pedestrian cellular automaton model to represent the vehicle and pedestrian behaviors. The updating rule of the simulation model is illustrated in detail. Moreover, the interaction between the jaywalkers and vehicles are modeled. The proposed model is calibrated and validated with field data. The simulation results concluded that:the proportion of illegal pedestrians crossing the street in the simulation model is slightly higher than the field survey data; the average crossing time of opportunistic pedestrians is shorter compared with law-obeying pedestrians; Pedestrians illegal behavior will induce the motor vehicle delay when driving through the crosswalk.The engineering application of the proposed simulation model is illustrated from the aspects of service level evaluation, the pedestrian crossing facilities improvement and the pedestrian crossing behaviors management. Meanwhile, a detailed case is provided to exhibit the practical value of the model in this paper.