Modeling pedestrians’ road crossing behavior in traffic system micro-simulation in China

In many Chinese cities, pedestrian’s road crossing behavior is different from that of pedestrians in developed countries. This paper presents a pedestrian model for traffic system micro-simulation in China. Considering the high rate of signal non-compliance, we classify pedestrians into two types: law-obeying ones and opportunistic ones. Opportunistic ones decide whether to violate traffic signal during red man, depending on the states of some external factors (like policeman, vehicle flow and other pedestrians’ behaviors). Questionnaires were used to determine the proportions of these two types of pedestrians under different circumstances. In addition, a time gap distribution extracted from videotape were used to determine the criterion for pedestrians to decide whether to walk or wait when they conflict with vehicle flows. However, simulation results deviate from the data extracted from videotape in some degree. By adjusting the parameters on the basis of analyzing the occurrence of the deviations, the simulation results agree with the field results better. This model has represented the high rate of pedestrians’ red light running and the mixed characteristics of traffic flows in Chinese cities, and it may be applicable in the micro-simulation of traffic system in other developing cities.