Jafari Alireza, Liu Yen-Chen
Department of Mechanical Engineering, National Cheng Kung University, No. 1, Dasyue Rd, East District, Tainan, Taiwan.
Nat Commun. 2024 Jul 7;15(1):5701. doi: 10.1038/s41467-024-50049-x.
Safety concern among electric scooter riders drives them onto sidewalks, endangering pedestrians and making them uncomfortable. Regulators' solutions are inconsistent and conflicting worldwide. Widely accepted pedestrian safety metrics may lead to converging solutions. Adapting the time-to-collision from car traffic safety, we define projected time-to-collision and experimentally study pedestrians' objective and subjective safety. We design isolated and crowd experiments using e-scooter-to-pedestrian interactions to assess the impact of various factors on objective safety. In addition, we conducted a pedestrian survey to relate the subjective safety and the metric. We report a strong correlation between subjective safety and the projected time-to-collision when agents face each other and no relation when the e-scooter overtakes a pedestrian. As a near-miss metric correlated with pedestrian comfort, projected time-to-collision is implementable in policy-making, urban architecture, and e-scooter design to enhance pedestrian safety.
电动滑板车骑行者的安全担忧促使他们驶上人行道，危及行人并让行人感到不适。全球范围内监管机构的解决方案不一致且相互冲突。广泛接受的行人安全指标可能会带来趋同的解决方案。借鉴汽车交通安全中的碰撞时间，我们定义了预计碰撞时间，并通过实验研究行人的客观和主观安全性。我们设计了使用电动滑板车与行人互动的孤立实验和人群实验，以评估各种因素对客观安全性的影响。此外，我们进行了一项行人调查，以关联主观安全性和该指标。我们报告称，当双方相向而行时，主观安全性与预计碰撞时间之间存在很强的相关性，而当电动滑板车超过行人时则不存在相关性。作为与行人舒适度相关的近碰撞指标，预计碰撞时间可应用于政策制定、城市建筑和电动滑板车设计中，以提高行人安全性。
