The identification of factors affecting drivers’ perceived risk in pedestrian-vehicle interaction: A crowdsourcing study

Abstract

Previous research showed that perceived risk is an important psychological determinant of road user behaviour and accident prevalence. However, little knowledge exists about how objective in-scene features affect a driver’s perceived risk in interactions with pedestrians. This crowdsourcing study tries to fill this research gap. A total of 1082 participants watched 35 out of a total of 86 dashcam videos featuring interactions with pedestrians extracted from the Pedestrian Intention Estimation (PIE) dataset. The videos contained annotations of pedestrian eye contact, crossing behaviour, GPS location, vehicle speed, and yielding rules. The distance between vehicle and pedestrian was manually added, and object counts (detected number of pedestrians, cyclists and vehicles) and respective sizes were added as an index of visual clutter. In each video, participants were asked to press a key on their keyboard and hold it as long as they felt a situation could become risky, and after each video rate perceived risk using a slider and answer whether the pedestrian had made eye contact. Videos in which the participant observed eye contact, increased perceived risk, suggesting that eye contact increases drivers’ vigilance. Videos with more visual clutter, and with higher vehicle speed were also associated with increased perceived risk. However, the causality of the correlation with vehicle speed can be questioned and may be mediated by the environment and whether crossing occurred. Videos in which yielding rules were absent, compared to videos in which they were present, did not affect perceived risk. This study is the first to investigate how pedestrians’ eye contact affects drivers’ perceived risk. The presented results could be useful in safe road design or be used as input for eHMI activation to enhance safety.