Pedestrian road crossing behavior at signalized intersections and mid block sections in Dhaka city

Abstract

Dhaka is one the most densely populated cities of the world. Here huge pedestrian gather in roads and intersections. At presents pedestrian crossing is one of the greatest challenges for the traffic and safety engineering communities. Present study deals with pedestrian crossing behavior at signalized intersections and mid block sections in Dhaka city. To carry out the analysis at first number of intersections were collected from DCC and then survey were conducted to find out the existing pedestrian crossing facilities at near about 70 signalized intersections in Dhaka city. The study reveals that in Dhaka city area the generalized situation of pedestrian facilities are very poor. It signifies that about 70% intersections have no visible cross marking and about 73% intersections have no foot over bridges and underpasses. Six important intersections were selected to count the amount of pedestrian crossing at peak period namely Shahbag, Banglamotor, Sonargaon, Maghbazar, Elephant road and Newmarket intersection. In this survey, direction wise amount of pedestrian crossing, number of pedestrian crossing with foot over bridge and number of legal and illegal crossing were collected. Pedestrian crossing behaviors were also observed at 6 selected intersections namely Shahbag Banglamotor, Sonargaon, Maghbazar, Elephant road and New market. Pedestrian crossing rate at these intersections is about 5000 to 7000 per hour at peak period and average 15% to 25% illegal crossing occurs at those intersections. Categorized Pedestrian crossing behaviors are collected from video record survey for three intersections namely Shahbag, Sonargaon and Newmarket which are different from different intersections. From the study it is observed that pedestrians are not willing to use grade separated crossing because it is time consuming and it consists physical labour. For doing this type of crossing they can take risky crossing. But in some intersections at grade crossing becomes very risky because of its high traffic volume and high vehicle speed. But pedestrians always prefer at grade crossing for this reason at grade pedestrian crossing facilities should be improved by different type of latest technologies. One of the latest pedestrian crossing technologies is exclusive pedestrian phase (EPP) or pedestrian scramble at signalized intersections in Dhaka city where possible. Pedestrian scramble signal has potential to reduce pedestrian-vehicle conflicts at urban signalized intersections with high volumes of vehicular and pedestrian traffic. In this study three signalized intersections were selected to incorporate exclusive pedestrian phase and evaluate it by delay parameter. The selected intersections are Newmarket, Shahbag and Sonargaon intersections of Dhaka City. It is based on the assumptions that if there is no pedestrians in the intersection during the vehicular signal phase, vehicular traffic would flow more smoothly. Introducing EPP in this study is based on the hypothesis that an additional pedestrian phase has a positive correlation to increase efficiency of the intersection.