Evasive actions to prevent pedestrian collisions in varying space/time contexts in diverse urban and non-urban areas

This study aims to identify driver-safe evasive actions associated with pedestrian crash risk in diverse urban and non-urban areas. The research focuses on the integration of quantitative methods and granular naturalistic data to examine the impacts of different driving contexts on transportation system performance, safety, and reliability. The data is derived from real-life driving encounters between pedestrians and drivers in various settings, including urban areas (UAs), suburban areas (SUAs), marked crossing areas (MCAs), and unmarked crossing areas (UMCAs). By determining critical thresholds of spatial/temporal proximity-based safety surrogate techniques, vehicle–pedestrian conflicts are clustered through a K-means algorithm into different risk levels based on drivers' evasive actions in different areas. The results of the data analysis indicate that changing lanes is the key evasive action employed by drivers to avoid pedestrian crashes in SUAs and UMCAs, while in UAs and MCAs, drivers rely on soft evasive actions, such as deceleration. Moreover, critical thresholds for several Safety Surrogate Measures (SSMs) reveal similar conflict patterns between SUAs and UMCAs, as well as between UAs and MCAs. Furthermore, this study develops and delivers a pseudo-code algorithm that utilizes the critical thresholds of SSMs to provide tangible guidance on the appropriate evasive actions for drivers in different space/time contexts, aiming to prevent collisions with pedestrians. The developed research methodology as well as the outputs of this study could be potentially useful for the development of a driver support and assistance system in the future