ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENT GROUPS OF DRIVERS AND THEIR RELATED DRIVING BEHAVIOUR IN URBAN AREAS

摘要

Traffic conditions of urban areas are significantly different from those of rural roads due to the complexity of urbanscenario, heterogeneous users (drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists, pedestrians) and the frequency of conflicting zones.The aim of this paper was thus to acquire greater knowledge on the real aspects of driver behaviour in urbancontexts and to provide recommendations for safety design of conflicting zones, taking into account psychologicaland perceptual characteristics of drivers.For this study, 95 volunteers were characterized by means of two psychological tests. Test-scores were integratedand processed by cluster analysis, which allowed identification of three risk categories (low, medium and high risk)related to the personality profile and driving style of the subjects.Volunteers were submitted to a test drive with an instrumented vehicle, along 3.5 km of a urban road in Italy. Speeddata, acceleration, braking action, engine RPM and steering angle were obtained continuously and in real time. Thedata were processed to assess real driver behaviour along homogeneous sections of the road and to estimate theintersection sight distance in the approach to different types of intersections.The results pertaining both to the whole sample and to the different risk profiles were compared with the AASHTOrequirements and analyzed according to the recent "Human Factors Guidelines for Road Systems". On the basis ofthe study results, recommendations and useful suggestions for improving perception and safety of urban roadconflicting zones are provided.