STUDY OF DRIVER YIELD BEHAVIOUR AT UNSIGNALIZED PEDESTRIAN CROSSWALKS IN KOCHI CITY (Paper 761)

The basic mode of transportation from one place to other is to walk, and we humans with all the modern means of transportation cannot do away with this at any point in our day to day life. In the present scenario where the focus is high on sustainability, walkability & multi-modal transportation in urban and suburban infrastructure; it is time to understand how well these will merge with the existing culture of the road users; both pedestrians as well as drivers.
The aim is to understand the pedestrian-vehicle interaction at unsignalized mid-block pedestrian crosswalks and study the yield behaviour of drivers to a pedestrian waiting to cross. The study is conducted in the undivided two lane city roads of Kochi. Four locations viz., three crosswalks at Park Avenue Road and one at NH 85 are chosen as part of the study. Video survey, radar gun and manual methods were used for data collection. The analysis includes non-parametric tests, viz., the Mann-Whitney U Test, the Chi-Square Test of Independence and the Kruskal-Wallis H Test; as well as development of binary logit model to predict the diver yield, using SPSS from the various variables which were coded and extracted from the collected data. The study also comprises of a questionnaire survey to give an insight towards the behaviour of drivers and their awareness of traffic rules.