Influence of the Size of a Personal Mobility Vehicle on the Affinity With a Pedestrian

Personal mobility vehicles (PMVs) as new individual transportation vehicles have been proposed around the world. It is important to ensure the safe operation of a PMV, especially when a PMV shares the space with a pedestrian. In this paper, in order to evaluate the influence of the size of a PMV on pedestrians, we measured the personal space of the pedestrians who walked against the PMV user. From the experimental results, it was shown that the width of the PMV and height of the step of the PMV significantly affected the personal space of pedestrians. Especially when the width and height becomes larger, the front personal space of the pedestrians expanded. In the simulation introducing the idea of personal space, the affinity between the PMV and pedestrians was quantitatively analyzed. It was found that the size of PMV affects to the affinity toward pedestrians.