A Bayesian extreme value theory modelling framework to assess corridor-wide pedestrian safety using autonomous vehicle sensor data

Pedestrians are a vulnerable road user group, and their crashes are generally spread across the network rather than in a concentrated location. As such, understanding and modelling pedestrian crash risk at a corridor level becomes paramount. Studies on pedestrian crash risks, particularly with the traffic conflict data, are limited to single or multiple but scattered intersections. A lack of proper modelling techniques and the difficulties in capturing pedestrian interaction at the network or corridor level are two main challenges in this regard. With autonomous vehicles trialled on public roads generating massive (and unprecedented) datasets, utilising such rich information for corridor-wide safety analysis is somewhat limited where it appears to be most relevant. This study proposes an extreme value theory modelling framework to estimate corridor-wide pedestrian crash risk using autonomous vehicle sensor/probe data. Two types of models were developed in the Bayesian framework, including the block maxima sampling-based model corresponding to Generalised Extreme Value distribution and the peak over threshold sampling-based model corresponding to Generalised Pareto distribution. The proposed framework was applied to autonomous vehicle data from Argoverse—a Ford Motors subsidiary. This autonomous vehicle fleet of Agro AI (owner of Argoverse dataset) is equipped with two 64 beams synchronised LiDAR sensors, a cluster of seven high-resolution cameras, and a pair of stereo-vison high-resolution cameras to capture surrounding road users’ information within a range of 200 meters. A subset of the Argoverse dataset, focussing on an arterial corridor in Miami, USA, was used to extract pedestrian and vehicle trajectories. From these trajectories, vehicle–pedestrian conflicts were identified and measured using post encroachment time. The non-stationarity of extremes was captured by vehicle volume, pedestrian volume, average vehicle speed, and average pedestrian speed in the extreme value model. Both block maxima and peak over threshold sampling-based models were found to provide a reasonable estimate of historical pedestrian crash frequencies. Notably, the block maxima sampling-based model was more accurate than the peak over threshold sampling-based model based on mean crash estimates and confidence intervals. This study demonstrates the potential of using autonomous vehicle sensor data for network-level safety, enabling an efficient identification of pedestrian crash risk zones in a transport network.