Traffic Safety Pyramid Based on Visual Navigation Distraction: A Naturalistic Study on App-Taxis

Abstract

Evidence suggests that mobile phone navigation applications (MPNAs) may reduce road traffic safety by causing a visual distraction. This study aimed to (i) identify a list of road safety-related events (RSREs) that could occur while looking at the MPNA, (ii) examine the effect of app-taxFi drivers’ glances at MPNA on missing of RSREs, (iii) develop any potential new indicator in road traffic safety, and (iv) develop a pyramid of traffic incidents. This study investigated 36 app-taxi drivers in real road traffic circumstances. Data were collected by video recording using a double-lens camera. The events that occurred while the app-taxi driver was looking at the MPNA were extracted, recorded, and classified. A time span of less than one second and a new indicator, namely “seeing the event BEFORE visual distraction” (seBvd), were examined. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and non-parametric tests with a significance level of 0.05 in SPSS 18. A list of 23 events was identified. The most frequent event was “presence of pedestrians across the road” (including crossing the road and beside the road 36%). The number of glances at the MPNA had a significant correlation with time span ≤1 s ( p = 0.001, r < 0.6). The total time of looking at the MPNA had a significant correlation with time span >1 s ( p = 0.001, r < 0.6). A pyramid of traffic incidents was developed based on the results. The new seBvd indicator is a binary (positive; negative) surrogate safety measure that can be useful in evaluating the effect of visual distraction on road traffic safety. The introduced pyramid of traffic incidents seems useful in traffic safety.