Abstract
Visibility is a critical factor for drivers to perceive roadway information, and fog is an inclement weather condition that directly impacts their vision, since it reduces both overall contrast and visibility of the driving scene. Visual attention has been considered a contributing factor to traffic crashes, and fog-related accidents are prone to be more severe and involve multiple vehicles. The literature lacks studies on the influence of fog on drivers’ visual performance and environment’s infrastructure design. This article investigates the effects of fog on drivers’ performance in a Brazilian curved road segment through a driving simulator experiment – more precisely, whether the presence of fog (foggy scenario) or its absence (clear scenario) significantly affects the visual profile. In the foggy scenario, the results showed the tracked area was concentrated in a smaller region, despite an increase in the number of fixations compared with the clear scenario. The fixation duration did not change between the scenarios and the pupil dilation was shorter in the foggy one. The study shows the influence of environmental conditions on the driver’s performance and is one of the first on the use of driving simulators with realistic representations of the road infrastructure and its surrounding for the understanding of driving under fog in the Brazilian scenario. Besides roadway geometry elements, driving simulator studies enable analyses of features related to the interaction between route environment and driver’s answer, and can improve safety in places with visibility problems caused by fog, reducing their environmental impact and preserving drivers’ lives.
Highlights
Adverse weather conditions significantly impact roadway conditions, vehicle performance, visibility distance, driver’s behavior, travel demand, traffic flow characteristics, and traffic safety
Apart from the knowledge of differences in a driver’s eyes’ behaviors while driving under clear and foggy conditions, the reasons for such differences must be known towards the design of interventions in highway projects that provide safety for drivers driving under foggy conditions
No statistical difference has been found for the mean fixations duration, this can be understood as a result, since under foggy conditions, the duration of drivers’ fixations, i.e., their information processing time is the same of that in a scenario with no fog
Summary
Adverse weather conditions significantly impact roadway conditions, vehicle performance, visibility distance, driver’s behavior, travel demand, traffic flow characteristics, and traffic safety. Ni et al [3] claim fog is a climatic condition that directly impacts driver’s vision. Its presence reduces both contrast and visibility of the scene in which it is directed, details, as the distance view increases. The absence or reduction of long-range visual information are dangerous, since, under normal visibility situations, drivers tend to look further ahead on the road they are traveling than at its edges [4]. Fog increases the risk of accidents because it hides long-range visual information, hampering the prediction of the path to be taken and the anticipation of events such as pileups or vehicle decelerations ahead [5]
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