Analysis of drivers' performance in response to potential collision with pedestrians at urban crosswalks

Protection of vulnerable road users has been an increasingly important requirement for today's autonomous vehicles. Analysis of drivers' response to potential collision with pedestrians can provide guidance for vehicle evasive manoeuvre and data support for traffic collision modelling. Field traffic data were collected by video recording and image processing at urban midblock crosswalks in Beijing, China and Munich, Germany. The drivers' response to vehicle-pedestrian conflict is discussed by deceleration and acceleration phases considering the lane-based kinematics of vehicles. Some basic characteristics describing the driver behaviour in an evasive process are statistically analysed, including the yielding decision, space history of deceleration, deceleration rate choice, and accelerating behaviour. Results show significant differences in drivers' yielding decisions. In addition, the onset of braking and the trend of the space history of average deceleration rate during the drivers' approaching process have been quantitatively proposed. The contributing factors to driver's yielding behaviour are analysed by the Binary Logit Model. The behavioural differences address the needs to make intercultural adaptation when introducing new autonomous vehicle technologies to developing countries. This study provides a basis for establishing evasive decision corrections for drivers or driverless vehicles.