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Title:

Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) Communications Technology: Do Cell Phone Warnings Improve Road-Crossing Safety for Texting Pedestrians?

Accession Number:

01656829

Record Type:

Component

Abstract:

The goal of this project was to investigate how mobile devices can be used to assist pedestrians in making safe road crossings. The authors developed a Vehicle-to-Pedestrian (V2P) cell phone app that warns pedestrians when they initiate unsafe crossings and tested the app in our state-of-the-art pedestrian simulator. The project extends on our earlier work showing that that texting pedestrians who were given permissive alerts (ones that indicate when it is safe to cross) took safer gaps than those without these alerts (1). However, they also paid much less attention to the traffic, relying on the alert system to identify when it was safe to cross. The current project investigated prohibitive alerts (warning against an unsafe crossing). The authors hypothesized that prohibitive alerts would lead to safer gap choices for texting pedestrians without the decrease in visual attention to traffic that they observed with permissive alerts. The authors found that although participants in the warning condition selected larger gaps to cross, they also spent less time looking at traffic compared to participants in non-texting and texting conditions who received no warnings. Surprisingly, participants did not heed warnings by aborting their crossing even though the warnings were highly predictive of risk; participants had collisions on 59% of trials on which they received a warning. The results call into question the effectiveness of warnings for the kinds of crossings examined in this experiment and inform the design of V2P communication systems.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AND30 Standing Committee on Simulation and Measurement of Vehicle and Operator Performance.

Report/Paper Numbers:

18-01425

Language:

English

Authors:

Rahimian, Pooya
O'Neal, Elizabeth E

ORCID 0000-0002-3934-4009

Zhou, Shiwen
Yon, Junghum Paul
Franzen, Luke
Plumert, Jodie M
Kearney, Joseph K

Pagination:

5p

Publication Date:

2018

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; Photos; References; Tables

Subject Areas:

Data and Information Technology; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2018 Paper #18-01425

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Jan 8 2018 10:21AM