Assessment of Pedestrian Crosswalks on Road Safety and Traffic Flow in Urban Areas

Urban Pedestrian safety on the Indian city streets is a very important issue in the rapidly developing cities that have large pedestrian populations, combination traffic, and poorly developed infrastructure that predetermines unsafe crossing attitudes and high pedestrianvehicle collision rates. This paper is an assessment of the effectiveness of pedestrian crosswalks at four major intersections in Nagpur city Chitaroli Square, Chhatrapati Square, RBI Square, and Medical Square based on evaluation of the pedestrian volumes, crossing behavior, roadway characteristics and safety, and the conditions of traffic flow. The pedestrians were classified as fast, moderate, and slow walkers in accordance with the field observed crossing times, according to the IRC:103-2012 standards. This analysis has indicated that the places where pedestrian demand is high and lack of IRC compliant infrastructure create a longer waiting time, increased tendencies toward jaywalking, and greater exposure to vehicle conflicts involving pedestrians. Well marked signalized crossings like at RBI Square had lower delays, improved compliance and improved pedestrian level of service. Based on these results, the recommended location specific interventions that could be used by the study are adaptive pedestrian signalization, raised zebra or table top crossings, redesigned median refuges, strong control of parking and encroachment, improved signage and behavior responsive signal timings that consider the real pedestrian speeds. The results also give practical information to urban planners and traffic engineers to make the Indian cities to have safer, inclusive, and efficient pedestrian crossing systems. The researchers found that on average 20-40 percent pedestrian delay at the crossings at inefficient or non-compliant crossing facilities increased, and signalized crossings had lower delays and higher pedestrian level of service. Pedestrian crossings were signaled which showed a 30-40 percent reduction in pedestrian-vehicle conflicts, a sign that showed greater safety and efficiency in crossings.