Influences of Mobile Phone Use of Pedestrians on Street-crossing Behaviors and Safety at Signalized Intersections

In order to analyze negative influences of mobile phone use of pedestrians at signalized intersections,a statistical analysis is used to compare differences of street-crossing behaviors between use mobile phones or not.Data of nine signalized intersections in Wuhan,China is collected by filed investigations.Previous studies evaluate pedestrian safety mostly by simple comparative analysis,and there are few quantitative parameters.Therefore,this paper focused on impacts of use mobile phones on pedestrians safety,pedestrian-vehicle conflict is used as an evaluation index,then a model based on ordered probit (OP) is developed,which is better to quantitatively evaluate and forecast pedestrian safety at signalized intersections.The results show that there are 11 factors significantly relate to pedestrian-vehicle conflicts,including pedestrian age,habit of mobile phone use,speed of street-crossing,crossing with others or not,times of looking left and right,running the red light or not,number of vehicle lanes,volume of left-turning traffic passing through upstream lanes,volume of right-turning traffic passing through upstream lanes,volume of right-turning traffic passing through approaching lanes,and signal cycle.Furthermore,mobile phone use increases possibility of conflict:at two-way 2,4,5,6 and 7 lanes,average conflicts of pedestrians who making phone calls are 3.56,3.42,3.33,3.29,and 3.00 times more than those who do not use mobile phones,respectively;average conflicts of pedestrians who looking at mobile phones are 4.78,4.17,3.80,3.59,and 3.30 times more than those not using mobile phones,respectively.However there is no significant difference in average conflicts of pedestrians who listening to music or not.