Pedestrian time-to-arrival judgment of vehicles in naturalistic traffic scenes

Pedestrians' time-to-arrival (TTA) judgement is their estimation of the time taken by a vehicle to reach their position, which is an important and fallible process while making road-crossing decisions. Unlike most studies that were conducted in simulated settings, this study evaluated the accuracy of pedestrian's TTA judgement and how it is affected by vehicle size in real traffic scenarios with the classic prediction motion task. An analysis with linear mixed models showed a significant underestimation of pedestrians' TTA judgement, with slightly higher TTA estimation for larger vehicles. However, the vehicle size effect is scarcely significant (if it existed at all). These findings have implications on the safety intervention of pedestrians and mechanism of TTA judgment, and point to the need to ensure ecological validity in future research.