Passing Path Assessment Based on Nighttime Field Driving Experiment

Abstract

The overtaking process on two-lane rural roads is a critical task for drivers and directly impacts safety. This paper investigates the vehicle’s passing path from the road-engineering point of view, consisting of a series of successive parametric spiral arcs, based on a real driving experiment with respect to the roadway’s posted speed. Passing maneuvers were recorded utilizing global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receivers. The curved paths were determined for two different and mostly typical posted speed values (90 and 110 km/h), where the impeding (passed) vehicle was assumed to travel under steady-state conditions (20 km/h below the respective posted speed values). The authors, by examining these curved paths, intend to quantify their trajectories and respective critical parameters, such as overtaking distance, headway distance, and acceleration performance. Four predictive lognormal models for each speed scenario were developed to estimate the radius of each overtaking curved section with high accuracy. Headway distance observed in this study is very close, while total overtaking distance is greater than those reported in the published literature. The present research is a source for road authorities to assess overtaking sight distance with critical overtaking parameters such as posted speed and vehicle speed differences as well as an opening paradigm of how the passing process can be standardized and therefore deployed in future advanced driver assistance systems.