Anae Sobhani

Arash Kalatian, Anae Sobhani, Bilal Farooq

This paper analyzes the distracted pedestrians' waiting time before crossing the road in three conditions: 1) not distracted, 2) distracted with a smartphone and 3) distracted with a smartphone in the presence of virtual flashing LED lights on the crosswalk as a safety measure. For the means of data collection, we adapted an in-house developed virtual immersive reality environment (VIRE). A total of 42 volunteers participated in the experiment. Participants' positions and head movements were recorded and used to calculate walking speeds, acceleration and deceleration rates, surrogate safety measures, time spent playing smartphone game, etc. After a descriptive analysis on the data, the effects of these variables on pedestrians' waiting time are analyzed by employing a cox proportional hazard model. Several factors were identified as having impact on waiting time. The results show that an increase in initial walk speed, percentage of time the head was oriented toward smartphone during crossing, bigger minimum missed gaps and unsafe crossings resulted in shorter waiting times. On the other hand, an increase in the percentage of time the head was oriented toward smartphone during waiting time, crossing time and maze solving time, means longer waiting times for participants.

Anae Sobhani, Bilal Farooq

A novel head-mounted virtual immersive/interactive reality environment (VIRE) is utilized to evaluate the behaviour of participants in three pedestrian road crossing conditions while 1) not distracted, 2) distracted with a smartphone, and 3) distracted with a smartphone with a virtually implemented safety measure on the road. Forty-two volunteers participated in our research who completed thirty successful (complete crossing) trials in blocks of ten trials for each crossing condition. For the two distracted conditions, pedestrians are engaged in a maze-solving game on a virtual smartphone, while at the same time checking the traffic for a safe crossing gap. For the proposed safety measure, smart flashing and color changing LED lights are simulated on the crosswalk to warn the distracted pedestrian who initiates crossing. Surrogate safety measures as well as speed information and distraction attributes such as direction and orientation of participant's head were collected and evaluated by employing a Multinomial Logit (MNL) model. Results from the model indicate that females have more dangerous crossing behaviour especially in distracted conditions; however, the smart LED treatment reduces this negative impact. Moreover, the number of times and the percentage of duration the head was facing the smartphone during a trial and a waiting time respectively increase the possibility of unsafe crossings; though, the proposed treatment reduces the safety crossing rate. Hence, our study shows that the smart LED light safety treatment indeed improves the safety of distracted pedestrians and enhances the successful crossing rate.

Bilal Farooq, Elisabetta Cherchi, Anae Sobhani

Stated preference experiments have been known to suffer from the lack of realism. This issue is particularly visible when the scenario doesn't have a well understood prior reference e.g. in case of the autonomous vehicles related scenarios. We present Virtual Immersive Reality Environment (VIRE) that is capable of developing highly realistic, immersive, and interactive choice scenario. We demonstrate the use of VIRE in the pedestrian preferences related to autonomous vehicles and associated infrastructure changes on urban streets of Montréal. The results are compared with predominantly used approaches i.e. text-only and visual aid. We show that VIRE results in better understanding of the scenario and consistent results.