How do healthy older pedestrians walk when they cross the street?

About 54% of pedestrians killed on French roads are over 60 years old (ONISR, 2012), whereas this age group represents less than 24% of the French population (INSEE, 2013). Factors such as slowdown of decision-making, reduction of walking speed, and difficulty of adopting sufficient safety margins can explain that over-representation of older pedestrians in traffic accidents (e.g. Lobjois & Cavallo, 2007). Other studies show that older people are capable of taking appropriate safety precautions. For example, Harrell (1991) described older pedestrians as a safe age-group in a study involving pedestrians waiting to cross at signal-controlled intersections. More recently, a self-reported data collected by Granié et al. (2013) revealed that older pedestrians are in fact the safest aged group. On the other hand, as motion analysis is often used to better analyse and understand human walking, it would be interesting to apply that method for the study of elderly people’s behaviour during road crossing. This paper aims at presenting a study of road crossing behaviour of senior pedestrians through a 3D analysis of movements using a road crossing simulator. Unlike most of the previous studies on pedestrian’s behaviour, our main hypothesis is that older people in good shape adopt appropriate behaviour when crossing the street.