Evaluating the Impact of V2V Warning Information on Driving Behavior Modification Using Empirical Connected Vehicle Data

Abstract

A connected vehicle (CV) enables vehicles to communicate not only with other vehicles but also the road infrastructure based on wireless communication technologies. A road system with CVs, which is often referred to as a cooperative intelligent transportation system (C-ITS), provides drivers with road and traffic condition information using an in-vehicle warning system. Road environments with CVs induce drivers to reduce their speed while increasing the spacing or changing lanes to avoid potential risks downstream. Such avoidance maneuvers can be considered to improve driving behavior from a traffic safety point of view. This study seeks to quantitatively evaluate the effect of in-vehicle warning information using per-vehicle data (PVD) collected from freeway C-ITSs. The PVD are reproduced to extract the speed–spacing relationship and are evaluated to determine whether the warning information induces drivers to drive in a conservative way. This study reveals that the in-vehicle warning prompts drivers to increase the spacing while decreasing their speed in the majority of samples. The rate of conservative driving behavior tends to increase during the initial operation period, but no significant changes were observed after this period; that is, the reliability of in-vehicle warning information is not constant in the CV environment.