Driver Behaviour Studies in the Motorway Operations Platform Grant

Abstract

This paper will report on a four-year project being undertaken in the U.K., which intends to address the causative mechanisms of motorway congestion, and how these may be overcome by the use of in-vehicle Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS). The project comprises five studies, two focussing on driver behaviour and performance, and three on microscopic simulation and road operations. This paper will provide an overview of progress made and work in progress in the former of these topics, in particular: i) Phase 1: an instrumented vehicle study collecting microscopic time series on how drivers behave in slow moving dense traffic. An overview of results from this phase will be presented. ii) Phase 2: to be initiated in late 2001, looks to examine how drivers behave when faced with the requirement for an emergency deceleration. The study will use a combination of a surrogate vehicle/test track approach and a fixed base driving simulator study, in order to examine the advantages of the differing methodologies and (if validity is proven) to increase database size. A brief review will be given of the intended use of outputs from these studies in subsequent simulation modelling studies to be undertaken in future years