| The proportion of casualties in pedestrians in traffic accidents remained high in recent years,thus improving pedestrian safety has become a worldwide challenge.Among the factors that caused pedestrian involved accidents,the accidents caused by cell-phone use during road crossing is on the rise,in accord with the popularity of smartphones use in the road environment.To provide theoretical support for relevant interventions,we systematically reviewed the impact of using mobile phones on pedestrians crossing and the mechanism of the impact based on a path of information processing during distracted road crossing.The review shows that using a cell phone can impair the safety of pedestrians in several ways.First,compared with non-distracted pedestrians,using cellphones leads to a narrower scope of attention and less attention be paid to the peripheral visual field,making it more difficult to perceive visual and auditory cues in the scene.Second,due to the decline in attention caused by the secondary task,pedestrians using cell phones are more likely to miss street crossing opportunities or make risky decisions.Finally,these pedestrians also have altered gait patterns and declined action stability.As a reflection on the reviewed literature,we found that existing experimental and observational studies have objectively evaluated the impact of mobile phone distraction on pedestrians crossing the road.The subjective perception of mobile phone distraction when pedestrians cross the street has not been discussed.Besides,although the impact of cell phones on pedestrian decision making,as well as scene perception and motion control has gained sufficient evidence,researchers have been relatively silent on its impact on the sub-processes of pedestrian crossing decision.Therefore,through a questionnaire study and a field experiment,this paper analyzes the impact of mobile phone distraction on pedestrians crossing in detail.The questionnaire research is a prerequisite for field experimental research.It mainly analyzed the distraction perceptions of different types of cell phone distractions when pedestrians use their phones across the street.The impact of different mobile phone distraction types on pedestrian sub-processes.And differences of pedestrians’ perception of each subprocess under distracting mobile phones.After that,based on the analysis results and previous studies,two mobile phone calls and mobile phone browsing tasks,which are of great research significance,and are convenient for experimental control,were selected to conduct experiments on the influence of mobile phone distraction on pedestrian crossing ability.The experiment mainly collects estimates of pedestrian crossing times for mobile phone call tasks,mobile browsing tasks,and undistracted task conditions,as well as real pedestrian crossing time under various task conditions.Finally,the results of the two studies are summarized as follows.(1)Pedestrians’ perception of distractions on mobile phone calls,mobile browsing,text chatting,and listening to music is more accurate.Among them,pedestrians’perception of distraction on mobile phone browsing and text chat is higher than that of mobile phone calls.Due to differences in activity frequency and activity content,pedestrians’ perception of distraction from watching video,video calling,and playing games is less accurate than other distraction types.(2)Although pedestrians can perceive the effects of cell phone distraction on the various sub-processes of crossing roads,pedestrians do not realize that these effects will bring serious safety consequences.At the same time,because pedestrians generally have a low level of distraction perception when using mobile phones when crossing the road,it may have caused more and more safety accidents caused by pedestrian distractions in recent years.(3)Mobile phone calls increase pedestrian crossing time estimates,while pedestrian crossing time estimates for mobile browsing conditions are not significantly different from those for pedestrians without distractions.However,mobile browsing and mobile phone calls both reduce the actual speed of pedestrians crossing the road,and mobile browsing reduces the pedestrian’s pace even more.(4)Mobile browsing will cause pedestrians to underestimate their crossing time.As the road width increases,they will more underestimate their crossing time.However,when the pedestrian’s pace increases,pedestrians can still cross the road within their own estimated time.Pedestrians using mobile phones are more conservative in their estimates of crossing time.They can estimate their crossing time more accurately,and the wider the road is,the more conservative the time estimation is. |
