Testing Pedestrian Flow and Delay Estimation from First-Actuation Latency

David Levinson
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David Levinson: TransportLab, School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney

Working Papers from University of Minnesota: Nexus Research Group

Abstract: Traffic signal controllers timestamp the first pedestrian actuation that requests service, but they do not count the people arriving before the Walk indication. We test a theory-based estimator that treats the time from flashing-don't-walk onset to first actuation as a censored waiting-time observation from a Poisson arrival-event process. The inferred event count and delay are calibrated separately to observed pedestrian counts and observed delay. Fourteen manually observed cases give mean adjustments of 2.202 for counts and 2.176 for delay assuming 100% compliance. A separate 24-leg-session video dataset gives 2.203 and 2.233. Held-out count errors are 23.9% and 22.4%. Observed behavior reduces delay from 16.606 to 15.996 pedestrian-hours in the manual data and from 12.934 to 8.522 hours in video.

Keywords: pedestrian counts; pedestrian actuation; Poisson arrivals; signal delay; noncompliance; traffic signals; SCATS; Sydney (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: R40 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-tre
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Published in Findings

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https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.166369 Published version landing page, 2026 (text/html)
https://findingspress.org/article/166369.pdf Published version PDF, 2026 (application/pdf)
https://findingspress.org/article/166369-testing-p ... ttachment/358010.pdf Supplemental information PDF, 2026 (application/pdf)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nex:wpaper:paper-2026-21

DOI: 10.32866/001c.166369

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