The Impact of Traffic Environmental Vision Pressure on Driver Behaviour

Abstract

Car-following (CF) and lane-changing (LC) behaviours are basic components in driving process. Previous models described them as physical processes with vehicle dynamics and physical criteria. However, drivers’ decisions are greatly influenced by their subjective vision information of various traffic environment elements. To solve this problem, we propose a new concept of traffic environmental vision pressure to explain these two behaviours. The pressure source consists of two parts: nearby vehicles and infrastructures. Pressure models were built to quantify the impact of traffic and roadside infrastructures on these two behaviours. 103 field tests (53 LC and 50 CF) carried out by 40 drivers were conducted to test and calibrate the models. Drivers’ psychological data and vehicle data were collected and postprocessed. Results showed positive relationship between drivers’ psychological stress and vision pressure, which verified the assumption that traffic environmental vision information would have certain effect on driver behaviour. Quantitative thresholds of pressure value were also given and explained with test data. It is concluded that the traffic environmental vision pressure in CF and LC behaviours is quite different, and higher pressure has more impact on behaviour change. We believe that these results will be helpful to study the micro driver behaviour.