The mobile phone use behavior and its effect on pedestrian safety at signalized intersections in China

With the widely use of mobile phone worldwide, many pedestrians are using mobile phones (such as making a conversation, viewing content, typing, etc) while crossing the intersections. On the one hand, it influences pedestrian crossing behaviors; on the other hand, it has negative effects on traffic safety. In order to quantitatively analyze the effect of mobile phone use on pedestrians' behaviors and safety, two signalized intersections in Wuhan city of China are selected as observation sites. The data of pedestrian crossing behaviors, traffic volume and traffic conflicts are obtained by video recording. Then, some characteristics such as the number of looking left and right and crossing speed of pedestrians who use or do not use mobile phones are analyzed. The amount of conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles are selected to evaluate pedestrian safety. For the purpose of evaluating and predicting the conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, the binary logistic regression model is set up which includes the following predictor variables: the form of using mobile phones and traffic volume. The results show that, mobile phone use influences pedestrian crossing behaviors, such as the number of looking left and right, walking speed and so on. Meanwhile, mobile phone use leads to significant increase of conflicts, and reduce pedestrian safety at signalized intersections.