Investigation of pedestrian and bus drivers’ decision-making behavior using schema theory and perceptual cycle model

Abstract

In Bangladesh, pedestrians remain the most neglected road user group in terms of research and safety measures, even though they are involved in nearly 50% of all fatal collisions. In the Dhaka metropolitan area, this statistic rises to around 65%. Again, bus/minibus contributes nearly 27% of total collisions and 28% of fatal collision, whereas the contribution rises to 40% (total collision) and 45% (fatal collision) in Dhaka metropolitan area. To reduce the recurrence of such collisions, it is necessary to understand the underlying thought processes of pedestrians and bus drivers, and how they interact with different road users.

This study contributes to knowledge through the analysis of verbal data of fifteen thousand six hundred seventy-two (15672) lines of transcripts generated from 46 pedestrians and 19 bus drivers, framed in terms of the Perceptual Cycle Model, where cognitive processes are described in terms of three categories: schema (mental templates), action (doing things), and world (environmental information). Concurrent verbal reports were provided by participants while they negotiated two busy area (Farmgate and Jatrabari) of mixed traffic in the centre of Dhaka city. The analysis revealed some of the factors that affected decision-making (road crossing behavior and walking on the road for pedestrian; hit pedestrian and collision with other road users for bus driver) at the different road sections. For pedestrian, many external factors (e.g., street sellers, rubbish blocking the path, lack of shade and poor pavement condition) prevented the footpath from being used and contributed to riskier road crossing and walking on road behavior. For bus driver, many external (e.g., damaged poor road, absence of road furniture, blockage of roads by wastes and materials, illegal parking and use of road) and internal factors (e.g., movement from wrong side, undisciplined overtaking and reckless driving, competition, and disobey to rules) are contributing to hit pedestrian and collision with other road users.

In addition to PCM, Leximancer analysis on verbal report (both pedestrian and bus driver) has been performed for construction of co-occurrence matrix and concept map which shows the count of occurrence and relevance percentage of the concepts. Moreover, density value (e.g., 0.65 for pedestrian and 0.59 for bus driver), diameter (2.00 for both pedestrian and bus driver), and sociometric values (e.g., 1.30282 for pedestrian and 1.17959 for bus driver) of network found from application of Applied Graph and Network Analysis (Agna) tool on the co-occurrence matrix indicate that the concepts are highly interconnected, close together, and busy. Furthermore, sentiment analysis performed on verbal protocol shows that bus drivers hold more negative sentiments regarding world/schema/action than that of pedestrians. Some safety implications and related recommendations are presented.