The effects of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) on driver behaviour while car-following

Shehab, Mahdi (2007) The effects of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) on driver behaviour while car-following. University of Southampton, Doctoral Thesis.

Record type: Thesis (Doctoral)

Abstract

Car-following is instrumental when studying traffic flow at the microscopic level. The current state of knowledge regarding the effects of lead vehicle type, and especially those of heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), on the car-following process is very limited.

This study addresses the effects of HGVs as lead vehicles on drivers’ car-following behaviour. This was done by utilizing 30 test subjects to drive the TRG’s instrumented vehicle in the traffic stream, where it was found that drivers increase their time gaps while following HGVs compared to following vans and cars. Furthermore, the effects of HGVs on driver behaviour were found to increase on upgrade sections. As regards driver characteristics’ effects on car-following, male drivers were observed to follow at smaller headways than female drivers. Moreover, older drivers followed at the largest headways while no differences in headways were observed between young and middle aged drivers. Young female drivers and middle aged drivers of both genders displayed the greatest stability in driver behaviour while old drivers of both genders and young male drivers displayed less stable behaviour. Additionally, no effect of trailing vehicle type on driver behaviour while following was observed in this study. This study confirmed two of the hypothesized sources of HGVs’ effects on driver behaviour, those being vision obscuration and psychological impacts. Another valuable contribution was testing whether time headway is constant for an individual driver, where it was found that drivers do not maintain constant time gaps from one following process to another. Finally, a linear model was developed to enable prediction of time gaps.

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