Safety effects of law enforcement cameras at non-signalized crosswalks: A case study in China

Pedestrians are vulnerable when crossing the street, especially at non-signalized crosswalks. In China, in spite of the priority that laws entitle the pedestrians, the yielding rates at non-signalized crosswalks are relatively low. In light of this situation, law enforcement cameras have been used to increase the percentage of drivers yielding to pedestrians. This study investigates the effectiveness of law enforcement cameras on drivers yielding behavior and vehicle-pedestrian conflicts at non-signalized crosswalks. Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and roadside video recording, information including pedestrian characteristics, vehicular characteristics and environmental factors are collected. The conflict indicators used include Post-Encroachment Time (PET), Time to Collision (TTC), and Deceleration to Safety Time (DST). In this study, a conflict classification framework based on PET, TTC and DST using Support Vector Machine algorithm is employed. A multinomial logit regression model is used to identify the factors contributing to the conflicts. Then, binary logit regression models are constructed to analyze the effects of law enforcement cameras on drivers yielding behavior. Conflict study reveals that the implementation of law enforcement cameras would increase the probability of slight conflict but decrease the probability of serious conflict. Yielding behavior analysis shows that the illegitimate yielding behavior percentages are over 10 %, indicating the necessity of improving the awareness of yielding rules, and the implementation of law enforcement cameras would increase the yielding and legitimate yielding probability. Moreover, factors including the adjacent vehicle yielding behavior, number of lanes between pedestrian and vehicle, pedestrian speed change, pedestrian waiting time, pedestrian accepted gap time, vehicle upstream speed and vehicle speed change are significantly associated with conflict severity and drivers yielding behavior. We recommend that supplementary facilities and measures should be used to improve the safety performance of law enforcement cameras.