Estimating Pedestrian Accident Exposure: Automated Pedestrian Counting Devices Report

Automated methods are commonly used to count motorized vehicles, but are not frequently used to count pedestrians. This is because the automated technologies available to count pedestrians are not very developed, and their effectiveness hasnot been widely researched. Moreover, most automated methods are used primarilyfor the purpose of detecting, rather than counting, pedestrians (Dharmaraju et al.,2001; Noyce and Dharmaraju, 2002; Noyce et al., 2006). Automated pedestrian counting technologies are attractive because they have the potential to reduce the labor costs associated with manual methods, and to record pedestrian activity for long periods of time that are currently difficult to capture through traditional methods. Data input and storage may also be less time consuming than with manual methods. On the other hand, the capital costs of automated equipment may be high; specialized training may be required to operate it; and automated devices are generally not capable of collecting information on pedestrian characteristics and behavior. For these reasons, automated devices are not appropriate for all pedestrian data collection efforts.