Testing Pedestrian Flow and Delay Estimation from First-Actuation Latency

Recently published:

• Levinson, D. (2026) Testing Pedestrian Flow and Delay Estimation from First-Actuation Latency. Findings, August 20, 2026. [doi]

Traffic signal controllers timestamp the first pedestrian actuation that requests service, but they do not count the people arriving before the Walk indication. We test a theory-based estimator that treats the time from flashing-don’t-walk onset to first actuation as a censored waiting-time observation from a Poisson arrival-event process. The inferred event count and delay are calibrated separately to observed pedestrian counts and observed delay. Fourteen manually observed cases give mean adjustments of 2.202 for counts and 2.176 for delay assuming 100% compliance. A separate 24-leg-session video dataset gives 2.203 and 2.233. Held-out count errors are 23.9% and 22.4%. Observed behavior reduces delay from 16.606 to 15.996 pedestrian-hours in the manual data and from 12.934 to 8.522 hours in video.

Keywords:

pedestrian counts, pedestrian actuation, Poisson arrivals, signal delay, noncompliance, traffic signals, SCATS, Sydney

Figure 1.Probability densities and case ranges for MCAV count, MCAV delay assuming 100% compliance, and video count adjustments. The shaded band is the MCAV count interquartile range.