Experimental Study on Right-Turning Driver Comprehension in Detecting Pedestrians During Nighttime

In Japan, all vehicles travel on the left side of the road. Right-turn traffic is the most dangerous and problematical traffic at an intersection since a right-turning driver has to judge the traffic gap of oncoming traffic stream as well as avoid pedestrians in the crosswalk. At intersections, failure to yield the right of way to pedestrians causes vehicle-pedestrian conflicts. The objective of this research was to investigate driver comprehension in detecting pedestrians at a crosswalk ahead of right-turning traffic. A visibility experiment was conducted during nighttime in the laboratory of the National Institute for Land and Infrastructure Management in Tsukuba, Japan. The results show that state of headlight of the car stopped behind pedestrian crossing had a high influence on the visibility for detecting pedestrians. According to our results, when the headlight was on, the pedestrian in the position of before entering into the crosswalk was hardly visible to the right-turning drivers. Brightening the road light illumination at this location and directing the headlights of right-turning vehicles towards this location are recommended as counter-measures to reduce pedestrian-vehicle crashes at intersections. Older drivers' ability in detecting pedestrians during nighttime was found to be less sensitive than that of younger drivers. Overall, increasing vertical illuminance at intersections is being proposed as an improvement method to decrease pedestrian-vehicle accidents.