Pedestrian Traffic Operations in Urban Networks

The pedestrian mode is an important component of urban networks, and greatly affects the performance of sidewalks and crosswalks, as well as the entire network traffic operations by interacting with other traffic modes (automobile, bicycle, transit). There have been many studies concerning different aspects of pedestrian behavior, such as pedestrian walking speed, delay, gap acceptance, signal compliance, route choice, etc. The Highway Capacity Manual (HCM) first included the pedestrian mode in 1994. The HCM 2010 provides several methodologies for evaluating the pedestrian level of service (LOS) of different urban street facilities. However, it does not comprehensively address pedestrian operations and does not consider some recent important findings such as pedestrian-vehicle interactions at crosswalks, pedestrian signal compliance rate, pedestrian jaywalking behavior, etc. This paper provides an overview of the literature on pedestrian operations in urban networks, identifies the important aspects of pedestrian operation analysis and provides several recommendations for enhancing the analysis of pedestrian facilities in the HCM on the basis of a summary of available U.S. and international literature. The following topics are discussed: pedestrian movement models, pedestrian crossing behavior, pedestrian-vehicle interactions. Pedestrian travel time estimation at the path level is proposed as an integrated approach for pedestrian operation analysis.