Abstract
Urban expressway weaving sections suffer from a high crash risk in urban transportation systems. Studying driving behavior is an important approach to solve safety and efficiency issues at expressway weaving sections. This study aimed to investigate the influence of drivers’ individual differences on diverging behavior at expressway weaving sections. First, a k-means cluster analysis of 650 questionnaires was performed, to classify drivers into three categories: aggressive, conservative and normal. Then, the driving behavior of 45 drivers from the three categories was recorded in a driving simulator and analyzed by an analysis of variance. The results show that different types of drivers have different driving behaviors at weaving sections. Aggressive drivers have a higher mean speed and mean longitudinal deceleration, followed by normal and conservative drivers. Significant differences in the range of lane-change positions were found between 100, 150 and 200 m of weaving length for the same type of drivers, and the duration of weaving for aggressive drivers was significantly smaller than for normal and conservative drivers. A significant correlation was found between lane-change position and weaving duration. These results can help traffic engineers to propose effective control strategies for different types of drivers, to improve the safety of weaving sections.
Highlights
Numerous expressways have been constructed in metropolises, to reduce travel time and improve traffic capacity
One possible reason for this is that the driver needs to conduct mandatory lane-changing behaviors in a limited distance, to get into his/her target lanes in the weaving section when a merging area is closely followed by a diverging area (Wang et al, 2016; Ali et al, 2019; Luo et al.,2019; and Hao et al, 2020) [4,5,6,7]
The questionnaire included 60 questions divided into five main categories: (1) driver general information, as shown in Table 1; (2) driving behavior at weaving sections that was based on the questionnaire and represented lane-changing behavior and scenario interaction (Sun, 2011) [26], and special driving behavior in China (Bai, 2010) [29], which focused on speeding, lane-changing, emergency braking and so on, measured on a fivepoint Likert scale, ranging from 1 = “never” to 5 = “always”; (3) driving attitude, which focused on individual differences in driving attitudes that were associated with dangerous driving behaviors and traffic accidents (Ulleberg, 2003) [30]
Summary
Numerous expressways have been constructed in metropolises, to reduce travel time and improve traffic capacity. Urban expressways play an important role in daily urban transportation throughout the road network, in the context of urban development. Evidence has shown that weaving sections, as an important part of the expressway, are more likely to be crash-prone areas, as compared to the ordinary road (Golob et al., 2004; Hidas, 2005; and Mao et al, 2019) [1,2,3]. Lanechanging behavior is a dynamic process that requires drivers to acquire and process information and operate the vehicle in real time. The main objective of this paper is to analyze lane-changing behaviors at weaving sections and to investigate the relationships between different types of drivers and their lane-changing characteristics
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