Investigating Car Users’ Driving Behaviour through Speed Analysis

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.