Evaluation of Pedestrian Behaviour in 157 Cities with 285 Hours of Dashcam Footage from YouTube

Alam, M. S., Martens, M., Bazilinskyy, P.

In preparation.

ABSTRACT Interaction between future cars and pedestrians should be designed to be understandable and safe globally. While previous research has studied vehicle-pedestrian interactions within specific cities or countries, this study offers a more scalable and robust approach by examining pedestrian behaviour worldwide. We present a dataset, PYT which includes 285 hours of day and night dashcam YouTube footage from 157 cities and 59 countries. We detected pedestrian movements, focusing on the speed and the pedestrian crossing decision time during road crossings based on the bounding boxes given by YOLO. Videos were carefully selected based on specific criteria to ensure urban settings and adequate pedestrian interactions. Results revealed statistically significant cross-cultural variations in pedestrian behaviour influenced by socioeconomic and environmental factors such as Gross Metropolitan Product (GMP), traffic-related mortality and literacy. The dataset is publicly available to encourage further research into global pedestrian behaviour.