Copyright © 2012 Xiaomeng Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

The operational efficiency and safety of pedestrian flows at intersections is an important aspect of urban traffic. Particularly, conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles in crosswalk are one of the most influential factors for intersection safety. This paper presents a cellular automata model that simulates pedestrian and vehicle crossing behaviors at signalized intersections. Through the simulation, we investigate the effects of different pedestrian signal timing and crosswalk widths on the crosswalk capacity, the number of traffic conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, and pedestrian delay due to the conflicts. The simulation results indicate that the cellular automata is an effective simulation platform for investigating complex pedestrian-related traffic phenomenon at signalized intersections.