An-Najah Staff

Ever since the revitalization of the central city area has become an urgent issue, especially for the countries where motorization accelerates the urban sprawl and the center of the city, there has been a tendency to emphasize the importance of studying the walking behavior and environment of pedestrians. Insight into walking behavior is essential for theory and model development describing the behavior of pedestrians on pedestrian crosswalks. In turn, combined models (Birth-Death process) can be used to test and compare different infrastructure designs, both from the perspective of efficiency and safety. To calibrate these models, simple data is required such as pedestrian arrival rate and pedestrian departure rate. This thesis deals with an approach to estimate the actual green time for pedestrian signal. The objective relates to the management of the pedestrians crosswalks to enhance utilization of traffic signals, which is considered one of the main issues facing transportation system especially inside the congested cities. A mathematical model was made to describe the behavior of pedestrians at and during the crossing of the roadway at signalized crosswalks. The queuing theory was utilized to model this process. The proposed model was derived and developed for CBD areas based on actual field measurements of key parameters at crosswalks in the urban area of Nablus-Palestine. The model was tested and calibrated on other locations in the city and the CBD area of the city of Ramallah and showed that it can be applied with significant efficiency which eventually will be reflected in the design of pedestrian signal.