Safety Evaluation of Car-Following Behaviors between Novices and Experienced Drivers

摘要

The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the safety characteristic of beginners and experienced drivers in car-following situations in China. On-road experiments were conducted for measuring the car-following behavioral data associated with beginners and experienced drivers. Then comparative analyses were carried out to compare the TTC (time to collision) and TIT (time integrated time to collision) selected by beginners and experienced drivers while they were following other vehicles. It was found that experienced drivers who have better driving skills to control following distance and speed generally prefer to maintain relatively smaller TTC values and have higher collision probability than beginners do when the traffic flow is in stable state. In contrast, if the traffic flow is more unstable, beginners usually have higher collision probability than experienced drivers which caused by their lower sensitivity to traveling state changes of leading vehicle.