Proactive Assessment of Pedestrian and Bicycle Safety at Intersections Through Video Analysis of Right Turn on Red Maneuvers
Project Description
Intersections are critical points in urban traffic systems where different modes of transportation converge, including vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. However, despite efforts to improve safety measures, intersections remain sites of significant risk, particularly for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. One significant contributing factor to this risk is the practice of right turn on red (RTOR) maneuvers, which can introduce conflicts between turning vehicles and pedestrians or cyclists crossing the intersection. RTOR maneuvers at intersections represent a convenience for motorists but often pose significant safety risks for pedestrians and cyclists. Therefore, there is a pressing need to develop innovative strategies that leverage advanced technology, particularly video data analysis, to better understand and mitigate the risks associated with RTOR maneuvers at intersections. Utilizing safety surrogate measures, such as post-encroachment time (PET), offers distinct advantages over relying solely on crash history data. These measures provide real-time insights into potential safety risks, offering a more comprehensive understanding of near-misses and risky behaviors, and enabling a proactive approach to intersection safety management that can effectively mitigate hazards and improve overall safety outcomes. By utilizing PET, extracted from continually collected video data available to the research team, this research also seeks to capture the severity of RTOR-related near misses, providing valuable insights for targeted safety interventions.
Outputs
The expected research outputs are as follows.
- Identification of vulnerable road user interaction patterns during right turn on red (RTOR) maneuvers.
- Identification of contributing factors to RTOR-related conflicts and near misses, as observed through analysis of video data.
- Development of a framework to classify conflicts into severity levels utilizing surrogate safety measures.
Outcomes / Impacts
The proposed research seeks to provide a comprehensive evaluation of RTOR safety using surrogate safety measures, offering insights into intersection-specific risks and informing evidence-based decision-making in transportation planning and policy. By developing a classification method for severity assessment, this research aims to contribute to the enhancement of pedestrian and cyclist safety, ultimately fostering the creation of safer and more inclusive transportation systems. The project outcomes will also improve our understanding of critical RTOR conflicts, that could ultimately contribute to potential legislation changes around this topic, which in turn would improve safety for vulnerable road users at intersections. The proposed research will also identify the implications of the classification framework for transportation planning and policy-making, and how it be integrated into existing intersection safety assessment methodologies. This will encourage the adoption of proactive safety assessment strategies, offering significant insights, particularly in situations where relying solely on reactive approaches (such as those based solely on historical crash data) proves unreliable. This unreliability may stem from insufficient data availability or the extended timeframe needed for analysis.
Dates
06/01/2024 to 05/31/2025
Universities
San Diego State University
Principal Investigator
Arash Jahangiri
San Diego State University
ORCID: 0000-0002-8825-961X
Project Partners:
Sahar Ghanipoor Machiani
San Diego State University
Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering (CCEE)
Bruce Appleyard
San Diego State University
City Planning and Urban Design
Research Project Funding
Federal: $75,411
Non-Federal: $31,179
Contract Number
69A3552348336
Project Number
24SDSU02
Research Priority
Promoting Safety