Mobile Phone Use at Un-signalized Mid-block Pedestrian Crossings in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The number of mobile phone users in the world is recorded at 4.77 billion in 2017 resulting in the pedestrians’ usage of mobile phones even while crossing the road. Data on pedestrian practices at un-signalized crossings in Sri Lanka were analyzed to find factors that contribute to distracted behaviors caused by mobile phone usage. The distracted crossing pedestrian behaviors were checked using four actions on the crossings with the mobile phone usage type. The percentage of mobile phone uses found on the midblock crossings was 7.45% and pedestrians using applications displayed the most unsafe behaviors with the lowest crossing speed of 1.08ms-1 . The crossing behaviors by mobile phone usage types was individually determined using the Chi-square tests. The results showed that pedestrians using mobile phones while crossing were more likely to avoid safe behaviors. Methods to improve the pedestrian’s crossing safety have also been proposed.