A driving simulator experiment was conducted to investigate two types of potential low costhighway engineering safety improvements in a single study. The experiment focused on: (1)advanced detection and speed reduction for curves in rural two-lane roads at night; (2) trafficcalming for small rural towns during the day. The experiment was conducted in the FederalHighway Administration's Highway Driving Simulator. Several novel graphics modeling,scenario control and data collection techniques were employed in order to successfully conductthis experiment:• Two different types of driving environments were interleaved into a single drivingscenario, necessitating multiple changes between day and night in a single drive.• A trial-based procedure was developed for presenting stimuli and collecting data for 20types of curves and 6 types of towns in a single drive.• Scenario control incorporated multiple random selection algorithms for curve treatment,town treatment, approach tangent length, curve direction, curve severity, etc.• The graphics incorporated a realistic dynamic headlight illumination model whichreflected pavement markings and post-mounted delineators (PMDs) at proper recognitiondistances.• A novel curve warning treatment was modeled with streaming light-emitting diode lightsmounted atop PMDs to indicate curve direction and curve severity from afar.• A voice onset trigger system was developed to measure curve feature recognitiondistances from the driver's verbal responses.These novel techniques facilitated a single driving simulation experiment to identify which ofseveral potential low cost safety improvements were worthy of future study in two separateengineering application areas.
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