Features of the Vision of Elderly Pedestrians when Crossing a Road

The present study clarifies the mechanism by which an accident occurs when an elderly pedestrian crosses a road in front of a car, focusing on features of the central and peripheral vision of elderly pedestrians who are judging when it is safe to cross the road. For the pedestrian's central visual field, we investigated the effect of age on the timing judgment using an actual car. The results for daytime conditions indicate that the elderly pedestrians tended to make later judgments of when they crossed the road from the right side of the driver's view at high car velocities. At night, for a car with its headlights on high beam, the average car-pedestrian distances of elderly pedestrians on the left side of the driver's view were significantly longer than those of young pedestrians at velocities of 20 and 40 km/h. The eyesight of the elderly pedestrians during the day did not affect the timing judgment of crossing a road. At night, for a car with its headlights on either high or low beam, the average car-pedestrian distances of elderly pedestrians having good eyesight were longer than those of elderly pedestrians having poor eyesight, for all car velocities. The color of the car body in the central visual field did not affect the timing judgment of elderly pedestrians crossing the road. Meanwhile, the car-body color in the elderly pedestrian's peripheral vision strongly affected the pedestrian's awareness of the car.