Effects of Lane Width, Lane Position and Edge Shoulder Width on Driving Behavior in Underground Urban Expressways: A Driving Simulator Study

Abstract

This study tested the effects of lane width, lane position and edge shoulder width on driving behavior for a three-lane underground urban expressway. A driving simulator was used with 24 volunteer test subjects. Five lane widths (2.85, 3.00, 3.25, 3.50, and 3.75 m) and three shoulder widths (0.50, 0.75, and 1.00 m) were studied. Driving speed, lane deviation and subjective perception of driving behavior were collected as performance measures. The results show that lane and shoulder width have significant effects on driving speed. Average driving speed increases from 60.01 km/h in the narrowest lane to 88.05 km/h in the widest lane. While both narrower lanes and shoulders result in reduced speed and lateral lane deviation, the effect of lane width is greater than that of shoulder width. When the lane and shoulder are narrow, drivers in the left or right lane tend to shy away from the tunnel wall, even encroaching into the neighboring middle lane. As the lane or shoulder gets wider, drivers tend to stay in the middle of the lane. An interesting finding is that although few participants acknowledged that lane position had any great bearing on their driving behaviors, the observed driving speed is statistically higher in the left lane than in the other two lanes when the lane width is narrow (in 2.85, 3 and 3.25 m lanes). These findings provided support for amending the current design specifications of urban underground roads, such as the relationship between design speed and lane width, speed limit, and combination form of lanes.

Demonstrating Brain-Level Interactions Between Visuospatial Attentional Demands and Working Memory Load While Driving Using Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy

“…Further, when participants drove in a narrow road condition as compared to the ordinary driving task with normal lane widths, fNIRS measured increased activation in the prefrontal areas (Shimizu et al, 2009). This supports other findings showing that driving in narrowed lanes is more demanding (De Waard et al, 1995; Liu et al, 2016a) and associated with performance loss (Rosey and Auberlet, 2012). Thus, narrowed lanes seem to increase visuospatial attention load necessary for controlling the vehicle safely.…”

Human-like driving behaviour emerges from a risk-based driver model

“…The DRF model also showed a similar increase in speed with lane width (Fig. 4-2c) and is compared to the results from a (moving base) simulator study of Liu et al 42 . On a wider road, there is a larger area of 'no risk', which means that the model can reach higher speeds before exceeding the risk threshold.…”

What determines drivers’ speed? A replication of three behavioural adaptation experiments in a single driving simulator study

“…fixed speed of 90 and 130 km/h, respectively) and one self-paced drive, each run at four different lane widths. We selected lane width as independent variable because lane width is a salient indicator of task demand, which, by virtue of the speed-accuracy trade-off, was expected to exhibit a strong relationship with self-paced driving speeds (De Vos, Godthelp, and Käppler 1999;Lewis-Evans and Charlton 2006;Liu, Wang, and Fu 2016;Zhai, Accot, and Woltjer 2004).…”