Characteristics of Pedestrian and Vehicle Flows at a Roundabout System

Abstract

For the purposes of optimizing vehicle flow and improving the crossings pedestrian safety, it is important to understand pedestrians-vehicles behaviors. This paper proposes a cellular automata model to study the interactions of crossings pedestrian and traffic flow on a single lane roundabout. The boundary is controlled by the injecting rates $\upalpha_{1} ,\upalpha_{2}$ and the extracting rate $\upbeta$. Meanwhile, the crossing pedestrian decision is modeled with a gap acceptance rule. The results show that, pedestrian (resp. vehicular) flow can benefit from small (resp. large) gap acceptance to decrease the interferences vehicles-pedestrians. Likewise, we found that the crosswalk location play a chief role in improving the satisfaction of both pedestrians and vehicles. However, the use of slowdown sections provokes a decrease in pedestrians-vehicles interactions and increases the traffic capacity.