Authors
Karim Ismail1, Tarek Sayed2, Nicolas Saunier3
1Department of Civil Engineering, Carleton University, 1125-3432 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada 2Department of Civil Engineering, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia V6T 1Z4, Canada 3Department of Civil, Geological and Mining Engineering, École Polytechnique de Montréal, C.P. 6079, succ. Centre-Ville, Montreal, Quebec H3C 3A7, Canada
Abstract
This paper presents a novel application of automated video analysis for a before-and-after (BA) safety evaluation of a scramble phase treatment. Data availability has been a common challenge to pedestrian studies, especially for proactive safety analysis. The traditional reliance on collision data has many shortcomings because of the quality and quantity of collision records. Qualitative and quantitative issues with road collision data are more pronounced in pedestrian safety studies. In addition, little information on the mechanism of action implicated can be drawn from collision reports. Traffic conflict techniques have been advocated as supplements or alternatives to collision-based safety analysis. Automated conflict analysis has been advocated as a new safety analysis paradigm that empowers the drawbacks of survey-based and observer-based traffic conflict analysis. One of the areas of focus of pedestrian safety that could greatly benefit from vision-based road user tracking is BA evaluation of safety treatments. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of conducting a BA analysis with video data collected from a commercial-grade camera in Chinatown, Oakland, California. Video sequences for a period of 2 h before and 2 h after scramble were automatically analyzed. The BA results of the automated analysis exhibit a declining pattern of conflict frequency, a reduction in the spatial density of conflicts, and a shift in the spatial distribution of conflicts farther from crosswalks.
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