Pedestrian Research Started

Elliott and I, along with a Chinese student, Ms. Xie, started up our research on pedestrian mid-block crossing behavior. It is starting out with some observations of illegal ped crossing, trying to understand how far one is willing to walk to make a legal crossing. This really depends on a number of things, like traffic and road width. China is known for it's superblocks, so sometimes it is a huge distance to get to the nearest signalized intersection. We are going to try and measure this phenomenon at several types of roadways, with varying geometric configurations and traffic levels to identify where and when signalized or over/underpass style legal mid-block crossings should be constructed. Or, when barriers should be built. I will blog about the new BRT line and it's barrier effect sometime down the road. Often, though, barriers have some effectiveness, but mostly just at reducing walk access to destinations, not necessarily a desirable outcome. We spent a bit of last week finding suitable road segments that have good aerial views to surrounding buildings so that we can trace pedestrian movements. We are then going on top of the surrounding large buildings to video the street segment so we can watch how pedestrians behave. Origins, Destinations, Gap Acceptance Etc. Our first segment has us on a big neon sign on top of a 22 story building. Two cameras with wide angle lenses lets us capture the entire street segment.