Pedestrian Safety: Drivers’ Stopping Behavior at Crosswalks

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The paper conducted a good data collection and carried out an analysis of pedestrian-vehicle interaction over long distances from different perspectives. There are the following suggestions for modification and enhancement.

1.Each country or region has certain differences in road safety regulations, but in general pedestrians certainly have priority. The penalties for whether vehicles yield to pedestrians in the areas actually studied are a more important basis for research. For example, some places have severe penalties for vehicles not yielding to pedestrians, so the probability of drivers yielding is higher.

2.The current traffic characteristics about the research crosswalk in the paper could be more detailed, such as the traffic volume and what the most common traffic scenarios are like, and it is recommended to give pictures. The reason is that there are big differences in traffic in different areas.

Author Response

1. Information about in country penalties to road safety regulations : In Rwanda the Office of the Inspector General of Police (IGP) set a tariff for violation of pedestrian crosswalk by the drivers excluding bike riders to an amount of 25$ dated 2015 under serial number 24 (RNP,2015).In addition to that an annual "arrive safely/Gerayo Amahoro "weekly campaign is organized by the police together with the Ministry of Infrastructures to sensitive drivers to carefully drive and give access to pedestrian for crossing at designated facilities but this still has achieved some tangible result of 17% reduction of road crashes as per the National Police in Rwanda (RNP,2020). This study was conducted as a measuring tool to cross check the drivers stopping behavior in order to investigate the prevailing situation in the City of Kigali and found that there is still a gap to fill as far as pedestrian safety is concerned at crosswalk based on this research output.
2. Traffic information about the area of Study : Reference can be made also to a separate study conducted on the road (RN1 and RN3) section in the same study area of the City of Kigali by (Nyirajana et al,2021) who described the traffic characteristics as the highest number of vehicles moving counted were motorcycles and this has been also confirmed by this conducted study results. From the finding ,it is realized that the traffic flow rates for buses, bicycles, cars and motorcycles are averagely 68,113,1943 and 4955 vehicles per hour respectively to study crosswalk sites ; again this  confirms that the motorcycle vehicles types are very important to traffic flow characteristics and will be the most common traffic scenario to impact on pedestrian crossing as far as drivers stopping behavior is considered.
3. The Highlighted explanation under 1st  and 2nd sections will be added to the revised manuscript to upload.

Reviewer 2 Report

The studies used both quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze the safety and 130 zebra crossing topics.

Using online questionnaire tools, to capture pedestrian crossing events, basic observation and replay of videos helped with spotting and noting down various traffic flow variables. These included, but were not limited to, type of vehicles, crossing times, stopping times, stopping distances, count of vehicles per crossing event and more

So far, it is intersting as the Authors can model pedestrians flows varying user behavior, type of conflicting vehicles and the specific day of the week and the vehicle density

I would be great to extent the result of the research to the next generation of Autonomous vehicle and theri interaction with pedestrian

Author Response

1. The study used both quantitative and qualitative method to analyze the safety: Yes, the study analyzed the pedestrian safety through investigating drivers' stopping behavior at 10 different sites within the City of Kigali.
2. To extend the results of the research to the next generation of autonomous vehicles and their interaction with pedestrian: This is a good idea that can be looked at ,for being implemented. This is appreciated too much
3. The second reviewer suggestion is noted down for future publication matter.

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is a revised version of an original submission. This research paper describes the safety issue caused by vehicle drivers on the pedestrian crossings through observing the stopping of drivers in pedestrian crossing events.  The study is conducted on the city of Kigali and it aims to evaluate driver’s behaviors against traffic flow parameters over 10 collection sites.  It is found that most car drivers are relatively less aggressive and managed to brake in the events. The data were compared to the stopping behaviors model and the traffic variables predicted the variance in that model.  

The paper involves statistical data on vehicle driver stops at pedestrian crossings. The data is compared to the models from literature. The paper mainly attempts to find the statistics from the model and compares it with real collected data sets.    The paper also presents the education and training on safe crossing behavior in traffic as a pedestrian protection measure.

The number of pedestrian and bicycle fatalities at highway- and pathway-rail grade crossings has increased in the last years .A large number of deaths and injuries occur annually as a result of road crashes among pedestrians and unsafe crossing behaviors still exist .The paper comes To fight the issue of pedestrian deaths and injuries through an educating and training on safe crossing behavior in traffic as a pedestrian protection measure for the pedestrian crossing in Rwanda.

The procedure followed by the authors is clear and the paper does not require any further improvements in terms of methodology. However, it terms of format, the following remark should be addressed:

-          In the abstract, use the present tense to describe the paper content and objectives.  This remark also applies to the paper text. Also, remove the last sentence about the future work needed.

The conclusions well summarize the work results and highlight the key findings.

The list of references is adequate and completely summarizes the state of art findings.

The language of the paper requires some improvement to be made on it. A complete proofreading is needed.

Author Response

1. Use of the present tense to describe the paper content and objectives in the abstract: Yes, this will be implemented accordingly
2. Removal of the last sentence about future work in the abstract: Yes this sentence will be removed in the abstract.
3. Suggested English proofreading: We (Authors) shall go through it for proof reading.
4. the revised manuscript will take into account the suggestions under 1st, 2nd and 3rd points.