Estimating Pedestrian Volumes at Each Crosswalk of Intersections: Comparison of Land-Use Models and Short-Term Count Methods
Publication: Journal of Transportation Engineering, Part A: Systems
Volume 150, Issue 2
Abstract
Estimating pedestrian exposure for all the intersections in a jurisdiction is crucial for developing strategies with a focus on pedestrians. Some engineering applications require the annual average daily pedestrian traffic (AADPT) to be disaggregated per crosswalk. When continuous counts are available at the intersection, this indicator can be calculated directly. However, when only short-term counts (STCs) or no information on pedestrian volume is available, the AADPT per crosswalk cannot be calculated and must be estimated using other means. This work (1) evaluated the degree of confidence for estimating the pedestrian volume in each crosswalk based on point estimates of percentage shares per crosswalk obtained from STCs; and (2) developed models to estimate the percentage share of pedestrian volume per crosswalk as a function of attributes of the intersection that commonly are available for jurisdictions, referred to as the land-use (LU) model. The two methods were evaluated using continuous count data from three different jurisdictions, and a naive estimate assuming equal shares per crosswalk was used as a benchmark. The performance of each method was measured as the fraction of the intersection AADPT that was allocated wrongly to each crosswalk. The use of the LU model generated an average wrong allocation of 0.301, a statistically significant improvement of 11.4% compared with the naive estimate. The use of a STC from a single day produced an average wrong allocation of 0.153, an improvement of 54.9% from the naive estimate. Increasing the number of days of STCs to two or three resulted in average performance indicators of 0.117 and 0.106, respectively. The benefits of using STCs for more than three days are minimal. The STC method was developed using STCs from the same 1-year period in which the observed share was averaged. In practice, STCs are likely to be between 1 and 5 years old. Analysis using STCs from previous years showed that estimation error in practice may be as much as twice as large as the aforementioned errors.
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Data Availability Statement
Some or all data, models, or code used during the study were provided by a third party. Direct requests for these materials may be made to the provider as indicated in the Acknowledgments.
Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge (1) the jurisdictions of Milton, Pima County, and Toronto for providing permission to use the pedestrian volume data and for providing rich open data portals that were essential sources of information for this research; (2) Miovision for providing access to the pedestrian data; and (3) Transport Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) for providing funding that supported this work. The work in this paper reflects the views of the authors, and there is no explicit or implicit endorsement by any of the aforementioned jurisdictions, agencies, or companies.
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© 2023 American Society of Civil Engineers.
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Received: Jun 16, 2023
Accepted: Sep 27, 2023
Published online: Nov 24, 2023
Published in print: Feb 1, 2024
Discussion open until: Apr 24, 2024
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