The total time required for pedestrians to cross the road is the summation of the time required to traverse the crosswalk and the pedestrian start-up time. But most signal time calculations do not pay attention to start-up time. This may result in dangerous situations caused due to pedestrian-vehicle interactions. Pedestrian start-up time is the difference between the time at which the pedestrian stepped off the curb to cross the road and the time at which the pedestrian signal phase turns into green. If the pedestrian steps off the curb during red phase, then it is early start-up time. If the pedestrian steps off the curb during green phase, it is delayed start-up time. Pedestrian behaviour varies according to several factors. Knoblauch et al. (1996), have considered weather, age, gender, curb height etc. and data were categorised accordingly. But Golani and Damti (2007), have considered the behaviour of a group of pedestrians. In this research, age, gender, group size and the familiarity of the pedestrians to the signal phase were considered. When considering the results of Vujanic et al. (2014), 17.5% pedestrians have started crossing during red phase. The highest number of offenders of both genders is under the age of 30 and the majority is male. This paper shows the importance in considering start-up times of pedestrians at signalised crosswalks.

Jayatilake, S., Premachandra, N., & Wickramasinghe, V. (2017). Importance of pedestrian start-up times at signalised crosswalks [Extended Abstract]. In T.L. Gunaruwan (Ed.), Proceedings of 2nd International Conference on Research for Transport and Logistics Industry 2017 (pp. 189-193). Sri Lanka Society of Transport and Logistics. https://slstl.lk/r4tli-2017/