Abstract

The threat towards the pedestrian safety near the school zones has been increased rapidly compared to the other locations. Insecure situation within school zones can be generated through risky pedestrian behavior as well as the road side condition. This study attempts to obtain a relationship between the pedestrian behavior and road side condition. Four schools in a semi urben city in a developing country were selected based on their locations (whether close to a major road or off from major road) and the presence of special features such as surface crossings, overhead bridges, intersections etc. Each school zone was divided in to four sub zones with 10 m of length. In order to find the relationship between the pedestrian behavior and road condition, video surveys and road inventory surveys were conducted at each selected school zone. Video recordings were analyzed under five criteria: (1) not using walking zones, (2) running on the road, (3) crossing road without using the pedestrian crossing, (4) illegally parked vehicles, (5) overtaking vehicles on the pedestrian crossing) to come up with a behavior risk index for each school zone. Number of vulnerable incidents related to each criterion was obtained through direct observation of video recordings and a weighting method was used to determine the combined effect of several criteria and thereby the behavior risk index for each sub zone was calculated. Road inventory data were analyzed under 8 criteria: (1) pedestrian surface crossing, (2) pedestrian overpass or underpass, (3) no on street parking, (4) no road intersections, (5) sidewalks, (6) no left turns, (7) standard width of lane, (8) safety fence, to come up with an index for the road risk. In order to find the road risk the percentage of crash reduction due to the presence of each criterion was taken into account and thereby, the road risk index related to each sub zone was calculated. It was found that there is an exponential relationship between road risk and behavior risk. When the risk of road factors is increasing the behavior of the pedestrians is being risky and thereby the behavior risk is increased. But the increment rate of behavior risk is decreasing with the road risk and after a certain point the behavior risk of pedestrians won’t be increased even though the road is worst.