This study aims to examine pedestrians' crossing decision, body parts' movement and full body movement, just before and during road crossing in a simulated setup. To accomplish this, a novel experimental setup for analyzing pedestrians’ crossing behavior and motion was developed where the simulated display was synced with a 3D motion capturing system.

Two experiments were carried out in which the participants observed varied short and long road crossing scenarios with changing crossing opportunities. Based on the opportunities they had to cross a 3.6 m wide one-lane road. The first preliminary experiment was aimed to assess whether this kind of experimental configuration is indeed valid and can imitate real road crossing environment. Whereas the second main experiment was aimed to assess how impatience and imposed time pressure conditions affected pedestrians’ behavior in road-crossing scenes, and to examine how these differences were reflected in participants’ body parts’ movement as measured by the motion capture system.

Results from the second experiment showed that under time pressure or when waiting time for a safe crossing opportunity increased, pedestrians tend to demonstrate riskier crossing behavior. Timing of crossing and crossing speed were dependent upon the crossing opportunity, possibly indicating that pedestrians start the crossing earlier and adjust their speed to compensate for the risk taken. Findings also revealed that within the control group, women tended to be more risk avoiding than men, however those differences disappeared in the time pressure group. Finally, the walk initiation process revealed a consistent pattern of four increments, each containing different body parts:​ the head and the shoulder first;​ the hip, wrist and elbow second;​ the knee as a third separate joint, and finally the ankle. Most importantly, the findings provide initial evidence that this novel simulation configuration can be used to gain precise knowledge of pedestrians’ decision-making and movement processes in addition to more conventional pedestrian simulator configurations.

Parts of this work were presented at the 2016 HFES Europe chapter conference in Czech Republic, and were submitted to the Transportation Research Part F:​ Traffic Psychology and Behavior journal for publication.