AUTHORS: Antonio Pratelli, Marino Lupi, Carmela Iannelli, Andrea Lorenzini

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ABSTRACT: Road crossing is a potentially dangerous activity: most pedestrian road accidents happen when pedestrians are crossing roads. During last decade, in Italy, more than 17-18%, out of the yearly total road traffic fatalities, were pedestrians, and the percentage of pedestrian deaths is growing up. Pedestrians attempt to cross the road when they perceive a safe gap in traffic, but they also attempt to cross quickly: so sometimes illegal pedestrian crossings are observed. Many factors were identified in literature as having an impact on the proportion of violations: gender, age, group size, conflicting vehicle flow, maximum waiting time and crossing speed. The main objective of this study is to observe pedestrian behavior in two different urban contexts: a tourist context and a typical working urban context and to highlight if there is any influence, of the specific urban context, on the non-compliance behavior of pedestrians. From an engineering point of view in order to identify unsafe intersections, where priority should granted to pedestrians it looks important to understand their crossing behavior as the extent of individual, environmental, location and context factors. Digital video camera images were gathered in the two different urban contexts, data were processed using an automated software self-written in MatLab. The tourist context is the beach town of Viareggio. The typical working urban context is the historical city of Lucca. Both the two test places are located in Tuscany (Italy) and only 20 km are in between them. Factors as age, sex and group size, were analyzed. Pearson’s chi-square test has been applied to investigate whether the difference between observed values and expected values of variables were statistically significant. The obtained results highlight that pedestrians in a tourist context are generally more compliance to traffic lights than in a working urban context. The obtained results of this exploratory study on pedestrians, in a recreational context as compared to a working one, raise some interesting questions whose deserve further research work

KEYWORDS: Pedestrian crossing behavior; red light violations; compliance rule; commuters behavior and tourists behavior at crosswalks; urban context influence.

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