A semi-naturalistic on-road study to understand what drivers perceive during narrow passage interactions in the UK

Abstract

Despite increased attention from those looking to model driver behaviours in narrow passage interactions, the investigation of the factors affecting these behaviours has been limited. This study, therefore, utilizes a semi-naturalistic qualitative approach to further understand factors considered by car drivers during their decision-making in narrow passage interactions. This was achieved by conducting an on-road study, where nine drivers provided concurrent verbal reports whilst navigating narrow passage environments throughout an urban route in the UK. After completing the route, participants were then interviewed about their drive using prompts from a shortened version of the Schema World Action Research Method in a cued, semi-structured interview. The transcripts produced from the verbalisations were then subject to a thematic analysis, in which several key themes were revealed. These themes included references to the importance of vehicle size (in conjunction with yielding gap sizes) and type when forming expectations of interaction partners, as well as the impact of surrounding vehicles, beyond the main interaction partners, on their decision-making. These results are, therefore, vital when trying to create representative driver behaviour models of narrow passage interactions and ensuring that Autonomous Vehicles act within the expectations of human road users.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Peter Refaat Salib Youssef: orcid.org/0000-0001-6755-329X

ORCID for Ben Waterson: orcid.org/0000-0001-9817-7119

ORCID for Katherine Plant: orcid.org/0000-0002-4532-2818

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