Lighting in residential roads is designed to meet primarily the visual needs of pedestrians rather than those of motorists. These needs include enhancement of their safety and perceived safety. One aspect of safety is the ability to make judgements about the intent of other pedestrians, whether or not they present a threat. A current basis of guidance is that lighting should enable facial recognition at a minimum distance of 4m, suggested to be the minimum distance at which an alert subject would be able to take evasive or defensive action if threatened. The literature however does not conclusively support this assumption, and there are clear variations in comfortable interpersonal distances with light level and with the procedure used to measure the desired inter-personal distance. This article reports a study carried out to explore the visual information extracted about other pedestrians at a range of interpersonal distances (15, 35, 66 and 135 m). An open task was used in which test participants were instructed to report all the information they could about a target pedestrian, and these were photographs of unknown people printed at different sizes to represent different inter-personal distances. The results appear to fall into three categories according to the relationship between frequency of identification and inter-personal distance. These data provide some clue as to what features of other pedestrians might be important and whether these features are distinguishable at different distances.
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)