The effect of “yield to pedestrians” policy enforcement on pedestrian street crossing behavior: A 3-year case study in Xi’an, China

Abstract Competition between pedestrians and vehicles on zebra crossings in China results in a large number of accidents and casualties each year. To analyze whether this competitive behavior can be changed over a short period of time, we tracked the Xi’an government’s three-year “yield to pedestrians” policy. The results show that (1) when policy enforcement went from absent to strong, the yielding percentage rapidly increased from 3.6% to 68.6%. Once the policy enforcement decreaseed, the yielding percentage rapidly fell to 34.1%; (2) the waiting percentage of pedestrians decreased by 15.2% when policy enforcement went from absent to strong; however, when policy enforcement went from strong to weak, the waiting percentage decreased to 11.8%; (3) with the increase in policy enforcement, pedestrian waiting time has been reduced by 41.58%; (4) vehicle speed reduced when policy enforcement went from absent to strong, and increased significantly when policy enforcement went from strong to weak; (5) the critical gap was smallest when policy enforcement was strong and risk-taking and confidence in crossing the street both increased by 16%, compared to the rate when policy enforcement was absent. These results demonstrate that competition between pedestrians and drivers can be effectively changed by policy enforcement. In addition, when policy enforcement is reduced from strong to weak, vehicle speeds increase, the yielding percentage decreases, and fewer pedestrians choose to wait, thus further aggravating the conflict between vehicles and pedestrians. Therefore, only by maintaining policy enforcement strength can pedestrian safety be effectively improved.