Pedestrian preferences with respect to roundabouts-A video-based stated preference survey

Research on user behavior and preferences has been a helpful tool in improving road safety and accident prevention in recent years. At the same time, there remain some important areas of road safety and accident prevention for which user preferences, despite their importance, have not been explored. Most road safety research has not explicitly addressed vulnerable user (pedestrians and cyclists) preferences with respect to roundabouts, despite their increasing construction around the world. The present research stems from the fact that studies related to roundabout safety have generally focused on drivers, while overlooking the importance of safety as it relates to vulnerable users, especially pedestrians. Moreover, it handles this particular issue through an approach that has not been used so far in this context; the Stated Preference (SP) survey. As such, there are two main goals (and contributions) of this work. First, to show how SP surveys can be used to investigate the importance of different design and operational features to pedestrian perceptions of safety in roundabouts. This allows us, for example, to quantify how some features of roundabouts (e.g. high traffic volume) can be compensated for by design features such as pedestrian islands. This is useful in helping to design roundabouts that pedestrians prefer and will hopefully use, to help encourage active transport. Second, to demonstrate how traffic simulation software can be successfully used to include difficult-to-communicate attributes in SP surveys. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.