Pedestrian gaits observed from actual pedestrian-vehicle collisions

Abstract

The problem of injury protection for pedestrian is a research hot spot in traffic safety, and simulations are important research tools. In the process of design of simulation experiments, pedestrian gaits become more and more important. Hence in the research three pedestrian gait serials (walking, running and emergency) were found through observing and reconstructing 150 vehicle-pedestrian collision videos. Further studies had found that pedestrian speed and pedestrian injury are different among the three gait serials and there is significant difference between the Pedestrian Speed Before the Collision (PSBC) and the Pedestrian Speed at the Instant of the Collision (PSIC) in the same gait serial; for the emergency gait serial, there is significant difference between the estimated and reconstructed pedestrian heights; and there is high relevance between angles of the left extremities and the corresponding right extremities. Furthermore, based on results observed from the 150 videos and those existing research results, ten pedestrian gaits in each gait serial were proposed, simulation results shown that the pedestrian injury in different gait serial and in different gaits in the same gait serial are all different. The observed pedestrian gaits will help us to design a more objective simulation experiments in the future in analyzing pedestrian injury.

Keywords:

• Pedestrian vehicle collisions
• Pedestrian gaits
• accident reconstruction
• pedestrian speed
• pedestrian injury

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 51775056), the International Cooperation Project of Changsha University of Science & Technology (grant no. 2019IC30) and the Excellent Youth Project of Hunan Education Department (grant no. 19B035).