Improving the safety of distracted pedestrians with in-ground flashing lights. A railway crossing field study

Current signage at intersections is designed for attentive pedestrians who are looking ahead. Such signage may not be sufficient when distracted by smartphones. Illuminated in-ground LED lights at crossings are an innovative solution to alert distracted pedestrians. We conducted a field study at a railway crossing equipped with in-ground lights to assess whether distracted pedestrians (N=34, Mean age 33.6±8.6 years) could detect these lights and how this impacted on their visual scanning and crossing behaviour. This involved a 2 x 3 repeated measures design exploring the impact of the presence (treatment) or absence (control) of in-ground lights (treatment) at a crossing, and a distractor task presented through a mobile device (none, visual, and audio) on eye movements recorded using an eye tracker, and verbal reporting of when participants detected the lights. Participants engaged in the distraction tasks as evidenced by their accuracy and reaction times in all conditions. With both the audio and visual distraction tasks, participants looked at the in-ground LEDs and detected their activation as accurately as when not distracted (95%). While most participants detected the lights at their activation, visual distraction resulted in 10% of the detections occurring as participants entered the rail corridor, suggesting effectiveness in gaining pedestrians’ attention. Further, participants were significantly less likely to check for trains when visually distracted (70%), a 10% reduction compared to the no or audio distractor conditions (80% and 78% respectively). The introduction of the in-ground lights resulted in appropriate scanning of the rail tracks (77% and 78% for the visual and auditory distractor tasks respectively) similar to that of non-distracted participants for the crossing without lights (80%). Our findings indicate that illuminated in-ground lights could be useful in attracting the attention of distracted pedestrians at railway level crossings, and possibly at other road intersections.