Understanding global pedestrian behaviour in 565 cities with dashcam videos on YouTube

Alam, M. S., Martens, M. H., Bazilinska, O., Bazilinskyy, P.

Submitted for publication.

ABSTRACT The interactions between future cars and pedestrians should be designed to be understandable and safe worldwide. Although 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, Pedestrians in YouTube (PYT), which includes 1562.80 hours of YouTube day and night dashcam footage from 565 cities in 104 countries. The included videos feature continuous urban driving, are at least 10 min long, feature no atypical events and represent everyday conditions, and are from cities with a minimum of 20,000 population. We detected pedestrian movements, focussing on the speed and the pedestrian crossing decision time during road crossings based on the bounding boxes given by YOLOv11x. The results revealed statistically significant variations in pedestrian behaviour influenced by socioeconomic and environmental factors such as Gross Metropolitan Product, traffic-related mortality, Gini coefficient, traffic index, and literacy. The dataset is publicly available to encourage further research on global pedestrian behaviour.