Zone-Specific Interaction Modeling of Pedestrians and Cars in Shared Spaces

In shared space environments, different types of road users share the urban space and frequently interact with each other, e.g., to negotiate priority. Instead of traffic rules, their interactions are governed by social protocols such as courtesy behavior and by informal rules like the rule of the road. Modeling the movement behavior of road users in shared places is crucial to evaluate the safety and efficiency of such environments. Based on the observation that this behavior differs based on environment topology, in this paper, we investigate two types of shared space topology: intersection zones and road zones. We use real-world data to investigate how road users behave differently in different shared space zones and model zone-specific movement behavior of road users. We validate our model by simulating various zone-specific scenarios involving pedestrian-to-pedestrian, multiple cars to pedestrians and also car-to-car interactions. The results indicate that our simulation model produces realistic behaviors.