Prediction of Pedestrian–Vehicle Near-Crash Events during Turning Maneuvers at Signalized Intersections

Abstract Urban road intersections are among the most critical locations for road safety because they involve complex interactions among multiple road users, particularly during turning maneuvers, where conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles frequently occur. This study adopts an observational approach to develop four statistical models for identifying the factors that significantly influence pedestrian–vehicle interactions during both right- and left-turn maneuvers. The study contributes to the existing literature by explicitly incorporating left-turn maneuvers and proposing a practical simplification of social force variables into directly observable indicators. These simplified indicators proved to be statistically significant and effectively captured the dynamics of pedestrian–vehicle interactions, enabling safety analyses in environments where advanced sensing technologies or automated traffic-monitoring systems are unavailable. The proposed simplification of the social force methodology incorporates variables such as pedestrian direction change, pedestrian conflict, crossing behavior, crossing speed, trajectory within the intersection, and the pedestrian paths. Vehicle-related surrogate safety measures, including crossing time and vehicle speed, were also incorporated into the analysis. Specifically, near-crash events were defined using the post-encroachment time (PET) indicator, linking conflict-based safety measures with behavioral and geometric explanatory variables. Predictive performance was further evaluated through receiver operating characteristic (ROC) analysis. The final specification (Model 4) demonstrated excellent predictive accuracy, achieving an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.992. Traffic conditions, geometric characteristics, and the simplified social force variables emerged as the strongest predictors of near-crash occurrence. The most influential predictors included pedestrian direction change, zebra-crossing time, curve length, crossing length, and the absolute difference between design and available sight distance.