Pilot study on pedestrian step frequency in naturalistic driving environment

Investigation of pedestrian step frequency is essential for analyzing walking gaits and pedestrian behaviors. However, most research about step frequency is performed in labs or manually controlled experimental environment, which greatly limits the utilization of the results to analyze and/or predict real pedestrian behaviors. This study investigates the step frequencies of pedestrian in naturalistic driving environment. The mean step frequency values and distribution are studied in all cases and separately for road crossing cases only. Furthermore, comparisons of pedestrian step frequencies are made considering three different impact factors. The results have shown that in real world, people tend to use higher step frequencies when crossing the road, especially when the vehicle is moving towards the pedestrian or when the pedestrians are crossing without right-of-way.