United States Department of Transportation
i
The Impact of Vehicle Automation on the Safety of Vulnerable Road Users (Pedestrians and Bicyclists)
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2018-01-01
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[PDF-1.01 MB]
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Corporate Creators:Safety Research Using Simulation (SAFER-SIM) University Transportation Center ; University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering ; University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Dept. of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering ; Tsinghua University ; Waterloo University. Systems Design Engineering
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Abstract:Previous studies have demonstrated that young drivers fail to both scan for and mitigate latent hazards, mostly due to their cluelessness. This study investigated whether these skills could be improved by providing young drivers with alerts in advance of an upcoming threat using a driving simulator experiment. A warning was presented on head-up displays (HUD) either 2 s, 3 s, or 4 s in advance of a latent threat. The hazard anticipation, hazard mitigation, and attention maintenance performance of 48 young drivers aged 18-25 years was evaluated across eight unique scenarios either in the presence or in the absence of latent threat alerts displayed on a HUD. There were four groups overall: one control group (no alert) and three experimental groups (2 s alert, 3 s alert, and 4 s alert). The analysis of the hazard anticipation data showed that all three experimental groups with HUD warnings (2 s, 3 s, 4 s) significantly increased the likelihood that drivers would glance towards latent pedestrian and vehicle hazards when compared to the control group. The hazard mitigation analysis showed that in situations involving a pedestrian threat, HUD alerts that were provided 3 or 4 s in advance of a potential threat led drivers to travel significantly more slowly than the control group or the 2 s group. No significant effect of a HUD alert on drivers’ speed was found when the latent hazard was a vehicle. An analysis of eye behaviors showed that only 7 out of 597 glances at the HUD were longer than the 2 s safety threshold, indicating that the warnings do not seem to distract the driver.
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