The effect of gender, occupation and experience on behavior while driving on a freeway deceleration lane based on field operational test data
Introduction
Deceleration lanes provide an effective and smooth transition space from high-speed main lanes to low-speed ramps (Calvi et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2014). They help traffic flow by reducing interference, increasing capacity and improving safety. The freeway ramp and its vicinity are essential components of the highway system, and the safety performance at these areas is critical to the overall system performance. However, lateral and longitudinal disturbances in these areas can create a greater safety risk if a driver makes a lane change or other maneuver over too short of a distance or time. While deceleration lanes comprise less than 1% of the total freeway composition (NCHRP, 2012), they were found to be riskier segments than the overall freeway main line. It was found that accident rates are comparatively higher on interchange segments than on other freeway segments. The traffic conditions occurring in the vicinity of interchanges are complicated due to drivers diverging, merging and changing lanes, which frequently leads to accidents as a result of driver distress and the higher volume of driving maneuvers (Wang et al., 2016).
The relationship between crash rates and deceleration lanes has been studied through statistical analysis (Lundy, 1967; McCartta et al., 2004; Zeng et al., 2016), simulated driving (Calvi et al., 2012) and mathematical modeling (Chen et al., 2014). Previous studies have demonstrated that deceleration lane length (Chen et al., 2009a, Chen et al., 2009b), traffic flows (Calvi et al., 2012;) and other geometric features (Lord and Bonneson, 2005) are important factors to consider in crash occurrence (Calvi et al., 2015). The above studies considered road factors; for example, an overall observation on crashes or the statistical relationship between crashes and the ramp. However, further research is required to gain a deeper understanding of the relationship between driving behavior and deceleration lanes (Guo et al., 2013; Wang et al., 2016). Driving behavior studies have shown that driver characteristics, such as gender (Özkan and Lajunen, 2006; Classen et al., 2012), experience (Di Stasi et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2016; Lyu et al., 2017) and driving style (Li et al., 2017), are strongly associated with driving behavior and traffic safety (Zhang et al., 2016). Even when exposed to the same traffic facilities and environments, drivers with different experiences have different behaviors. Predicting who is “risky” while driving on the deceleration lane and how to improve training and management in this area are both problems that scholars aim to solve. However, driving behaviors on deceleration lanes in particular has not been a focus of previous research.
To attempt to reduce traffic crashes, it is important to further explore the behavior of different drivers on a highway deceleration lane. The main objective of this study was to analyze driving behaviors on a typical expressway deceleration lane using actual road experiment data. The study obtained and used field operational test (FOT) data from 89 driving instances (derived from 46 participants who drove the test road twice) to extract section speed profiles, vehicle trajectories, lane position and other key parameters. Using the FOT data, the lane-change characteristics and speed profiles of drivers with different genders, occupations and experiences were analyzed. The significant disparities between the groups reflects the risks associated with different types of drivers. This research work provides ground truth data for deceleration lane design, driver ability training and off-ramp traffic management.
Section snippets
Literature review
Over the past several decades, many studies have focused on the safety issues associated with freeway deceleration lanes, particularly on investigating the impact of deceleration lane lengths on safety (Lundy, 1967; Bared et al., 1999; Hunter et al., 2001; McCartta et al., 2004; FHWA, 2005; Garcia and Romero, 2006). However, the conclusions were inconsistent due to different assumptions made in the deceleration models used. For example, the design criteria of deceleration lane lengths were
Research objective
Many studies have reported high crash rates on freeway deceleration lanes, which account for 44% of freeway crashes. The behaviors of drivers with different genders, occupations and experiences vary greatly on deceleration lanes. Drivers’ inappropriate performance and driving characteristics may cause traffic crashes. Therefore, driving behaviors on deceleration lanes are worth studying. The main objective of this study was to evaluate different characteristics of drivers on the freeway
The lateral position when vehicle entered the deceleration lane
The lateral position of the vehicle on the road shows the performance effect of the driver on the lateral operation of the vehicle. Because the vehicle entered the exit area of the interchange, it must move to the right lane to drive out of the main lane. In this study, the lane position was recorded when the vehicle was 200 m ahead of the taper. It should be noted that a 200 m longitudinal distance for a lane change is not significantly long. Therefore, vehicles in the area were expected to
Conclusions
This study analyzed driver characteristics by using actual FOT data regarding driving behavior on a freeway deceleration lane; the issues surrounding the deceleration lane on the exit of the freeway were also discussed. The effect of the drivers’ characteristics, including gender, occupation and experience, was explored. This analysis of vehicle trajectories and driving performance provides a basis for improving the behaviors of different types of drivers.
Male drivers changed to the outside
Acknowledgement
This study was supported by The Nature Science Foundation of China: Modeling driving cognition behavior and driving performance improvement methodology considering workload environment (51678460); The Natural Science Foundation of China (U1664262, 51775396); The Natural Science Foundation of Hubei Province, China (ZRMS2017001571); Foundation of Key Laboratory for Automotive Transportation Safety Enhancement Technology of the Ministry of Communication (300102228503). The authors would like to
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