Abstract
Speed has been identified for a long time as a key risk factor in road traffic: inappropriate speeds contribute to a relevant part of traffic accidents. Many literature studies have focused on the relationship between speed and accident risk. Starting from this consideration this paper investigates traffic accident risk by analysing the travelling speeds recorded by real tests on the road. A survey was conducted to collect experimental speed values in a real context. A specific road segment, belonging to an Italian rural two-lane road, was repeatedly run by 27 drivers in order to collect the instantaneous speed values for each trajectory. Smartphone-equipped vehicles were used to record continuous speed data. The recorded data were used to calculate: the average speed, 50th and 85th percentile speed for each geometric element of the analysed road segment. The main result of the research is the classification of car users’ driving behaviour based on the speed values. By using the above mentioned ranges of speed, the classification provides three types of driving behaviour: safe, unsafe, and safe but potentially dangerous. It was found that only four drivers feature “safe” behaviour, driving in a safe manner on most of the road elements. However, the major part of drivers, even if they feature safe behaviour, could be dangerous for other drivers because they drive at very low speeds.
Highlights
Based on the most recent report of the World Health Organization, in the year 2013 about 1.25 million people were killed on the world roads, that is, about 3 thousand people died every day
The report of the World Health Organization confirms that among all the risk factors related to the driving behaviour, speeding is considered as the major road safety problem in all countries
Starting from the literature review, we developed the idea of defining the driving style of car drivers based on speed values recorded by real-time vehicle tracking, and introducing types of driving behaviour according to ranges of speed
Summary
Based on the most recent report of the World Health Organization, in the year 2013 about 1.25 million people were killed on the world roads, that is, about 3 thousand people died every day. By considering driving behaviour, the drivers were distinguished on the basis of their level of “aggressiveness” (see for example [9]), where an aggressive driving style is a way of affecting any type of manoeuvre on a vehicle in which the driver deliberately behaves in such a manner as to increase the risk of a road accident. As noted by Bonsall et al [9], the key parameters of traffic simulation models have been derived from theory or informed guesswork rather than from observation of real behaviour of the drivers Starting from this observation, the aim of this work is to introduce a methodology for classifying the driving style of the car drivers on the basis of real road driving data collected for different drivers. In the fourth section the results are reported, and some conclusions about the work are provided
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