Published In

Transportation Research Record

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

4-28-2021

Abstract

Walking is the most basic and sustainable mode of transportation, and many jurisdictions would like to see increased walking rates as a way of reducing congestion and emission levels and improving public health. In the United States, walking trips account for 10.5% of all trips undertaken. To increase this rate, additional research on what makes people feel more comfortable while walking is needed. Research on pedestrian quality of service (QOS) has sought to quantify the performance of the pedestrian facilities from a pedestrian’s perspective. However, the impact of pedestrian safety countermeasures on pedestrian QOS for roadway crossings is largely unknown. The objective of this study is to discern pedestrian QOS based on physiological measurements of pedestrians performing normal walking activities in different traffic contexts. The naturalistic walking study described in this paper recruited 15 pedestrians and asked each to wear an instrumented wristband and GPS recorder on all walking trips for one week. Surprisingly, the findings from the study showed no correlation between participants’ stress levels and individual crossing locations. Instead, stress was associated with roadway conditions. Higher levels of stress were generally associated with walking in proximity to collector and arterial streets and in areas with industrial and mixed (e.g., offices, retail, residential) land uses. Stress levels were tempered in lower-density residential land uses, as well as in forest, park, and university campus environments. The outcomes from this study can inform how planners design urban environments that reduce pedestrian stress levels to promote walkability. Walking is the most basic and sustainable mode of transportation, and many jurisdictions would like to see increased walking rates as a way of reducing congestion and emission levels and improving public health. In the United States, on a typical day in 2017, there were 38.9 million walking trips accounting for 10.5% of all trips undertaken. Walking is thus the second most prevalent mode after driving or riding in an automobile (1). Despite this, walking has received far less attention than the automobile with respect to guidance on planning, designing, and operating safe, functional, and comfortable facilities. Early research efforts on pedestrian quality of service (QOS) analysis employed vehicular performance measures such as delay and density. More recent research efforts have sought to quantify the operation of the pedestrian facilities from the pedestrian’s point of view and have been included in the recent versions of the Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) (2, 3). The HCM defines QOS as “a description of how well a transportation facility or service operates from a traveler’s perspective.” The HCM 6th ed. uses pedestrian delay as the basis for determining the level of service (LOS) of uncontrolled street crossings (3). The effects of some countermeasures on LOS can be evaluated using the HCM based on their ability to improve motorist yielding rates to pedestrians, shorten crossing distances, or both, which tends to reduce pedestrian delay. However, it is not known whether the presence of safety countermeasures improved QOS in other ways. For example, all else being equal, does the presence of a safety countermeasure correspond to a decrease in stress for the pedestrian? The objective of this study was to determine how safety countermeasures affect the pedestrian QOS of roadway crossings, based on physiological measurements of pedestrians performing normal walking activities in varied traffic contexts. This study was part of a larger National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Project 17-87, the objective of which was the determine the effect of specific safety countermeasures on pedestrian satisfaction. The larger study followed a three-pronged approach to evaluating pedestrian crossing satisfaction and included the naturalistic walking study, which is the focus of this paper. The naturalistic walking study recruited 15 pedestrians in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and asked each to wear an instrumented wristband and GPS recorder on all walking trips for one week. Physiological measurements, including heart rate (HR) and electrodermal activity (EDA) were collected to record indicators of actual pedestrian stress levels, which are a proxy of pedestrian QOS. During their normal walking trips, participants encountered a variety of environments, from high traffic roadways with signalized intersections to tree-lined paths in pedestrian dominated areas. This provided a variety of contexts from which to compare pedestrian stress levels. This approach is novel in the study of pedestrian satisfaction. The findings from this study demonstrated no correlation between participants’ stress levels and individual crossing locations. Instead, stress was associated with roadway conditions with higher levels of stress being generally associated with walking in proximity to collector and arterial streets and in areas with industrial and mixed (e.g., offices, retail, residential) land uses. Stress levels were tempered in lower-density residential land uses, as well as in forest, park, and university campus environments. The paper is laid out as follows. The background section provides a summary of related work on pedestrian QOS. The methods section is next, followed by results and conclusions.

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Copyright (c) 2021 The Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1177/03611981211010183

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/36324

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