Abstract
Pedestrian safety was recently highlighted with a yellow carpet, a yellow-colored pavement material prepared for children waiting for signals for pedestrian crossing, without validation of its efficiency in practice. It was a promising device likely to assist highway safety by stimulating pedestrian to step on the yellow-colored area; it was generally called nudge effects. This paper delivers a study conducted to check the effectiveness of yellow carpet in three different aspects in vehicle driver's perspective by applying the newly introduced information technology (IT) service: Visual Attention Software (VAS). It was assumed that VAS developed by 3M in the United States should be able explain the Korean drivers' visual reaction behaviors since technology embedded in VAS was developed based on and proved by other various international countries and continents in the world. A set of pictures was taken at thirteen different field sites in seven school zone areas in the Seoul metropolitan area before and after the installation of a yellow carpet, respectively. Sets of those pictures were analyzed with VAS, and the results were compared based on the selective safety measures: the likely focusing on standing pedestrians (waiting for a pedestrian's green signal time) affected by its background (yellow-colored pavement) contrasting him or her. The test results from a set of before-and-after comparison analyses showed that the placement of yellow carpet would (1) increase 71% of driver's visual attention on pedestrian crossing areas and (2) change the sequential order of visual attention on that area 2.4 steps ahead. The findings would enhance deployment of such promising efficiency and thus increase children safety in pedestrian crossing. The result was promising to highlight the way to support the changes in conservative traffic safety engineering field by applying the advanced IT services, while much robust research was recommended to overcome the limitation of simplification of this study.
