Modeling Cyclists Behavior at a Roundabout Approach: Fid-Bau Portal

Modeling Cyclists Behavior at a Roundabout Approach

Al-Haideri, Rulla / Ismail, Karim / Weiss, Adam

This work adapts a pedestrian-based modeling framework to represent cyclists’ behavior when crossing at a roundabout approach. The original pedestrian model structure captured pedestrian movement using a series of discrete choice models. This work expands on the previous model by applying a similar structure of discrete choice models to the behavior of cyclists as they cross the approach. Expectedly, the cyclists will behave in a different manner than pedestrians interacting with each other, thus requiring a new modeling framework. To account for these differences in behavior, additional modifications are introduced to the pedestrian-only model to capture cyclists’ choice. The proposed modeling structure will improve on conventional traffic microsimulation which uses a series of vehicle following models or simple rule-based approaches that cannot fully capture the dynamics of cyclist’s decision-making. The trajectories dataset used in this model are publicly available as the rounD dataset which is a real-world trajectory dataset extracted from drone videos. The trajectories were further analyzed to extract positional choices made by cyclists every half a second. A Multinomial Logit model is proposed to capture the choice process that describes cyclist's crossing. The model parameters are estimated in this study using maximum likelihood estimation. Comments on the statistical significance and goodness of fit are presented which were generally acceptable. The improvements in predicting cyclists’ behavior that this modeling structure promises will have significant potential benefits in improving the realism of multimodal traffic microsimulation, cycling infrastructure design and cyclists’ safety.