Abstract
Tunnels are critical areas for highway safety because the severity of crashes in tunnels tends to be more serious. Controlling vehicle speed is regarded as a feasible measure to reduce the accident rate in the tunnel entrance and exit areas. This paper aims to evaluate the effectiveness of three types of speed reduction markings (SRMs) in tunnel entrance and exit zones by conducting a driving simulation experiment. For this study, 25 drivers completed the driving tasks in the day and night scenarios. The vehicle speed and acceleration data were collected for analysing and the relative speed contrast, time mean speed and acceleration were adopted as indices to evaluate the effectiveness of SRMs. The repeated ANOVA test results revealed that SRMs have a significant effect in reducing vehicle speed, especially in the exit zone. Colour Anti-skid Markings (CASMs) produced a more obvious deceleration in the entrance zone. In the entrance zone, a similar downward trend was performed in the situation of NSRMs and SRMs, but a lower speed occurred in case of SRMs. Besides, CASMs work better and cause an obvious gap of 10 km/h in daytime and 5 km/h at night compared to the speed without SRMs. In the exit zone, the present study supports the conclusion that the drivers are prone to accelerate. Our results showed that the drivers accelerated in case of NSRMs, while they slowed down in case of SRMs. Thus, SRMs are necessarily implemented in the highway tunnel entrance and exit zones. Our study also indicates that though CASMs result in lower speed at night, the Transverse Speed Reduction Markings(TSRMs) have a better performance than CASMs in daytime. The investigation provides essential information for developing a new marking design criterion and intelligent driver support systems in the highway tunnel zones.
Highlights
According to the Chinese statistical yearbook (2013), there were approximately 39 million traffic accidents in 2013, which resulted in 65,225 deaths and 254,075 injuries, with a direct economic loss of just over 930 million RMB [1], with the main factors resulting in traffic accidents being speeding, drunk driving and fatigued driving [2]
A similar finding was reported in the previous literature, that Colour Anti-skid Markings (CASMs) are effective in reducing the accident rate [34], raising the driver’s vigilance [31, 32, 34, 35], and increasing the luminance in the tunnel entrance and exit zones [31]
Our study indicates that though CASMs result in lower speed at night, Transverse Speed Reduction Markings (TSRMs) perform better than CASMs in daytime
Summary
According to the Chinese statistical yearbook (2013), there were approximately 39 million traffic accidents in 2013, which resulted in 65,225 deaths and 254,075 injuries, with a direct economic loss of just over 930 million RMB [1], with the main factors resulting in traffic accidents being speeding, drunk driving and fatigued driving [2]. The main types of tunnel accidents are rear-end collisions [6,7,8,9], crashes into the tunnel wall, rolling over [9] and fire disasters [4, 10, 11]. These accidents could result in significant economic losses and negative social influences. Reducing the number of accidents in the tunnel entrance and exit zones is crucial to improve the traffic safety associated with tunnels
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