Citation

Zwahlen HT. Highw. Res. Rec. 1973; 464: 1-29.

Copyright

(Copyright © 1973, National Research Council (U.S.A.), Highway Research Board)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

A methodology to classify automobile drivers according to their risk-acceptance decisions, their visual-perception capabilties, and their driving skills is presented. A drive- through gap situation was used to develop and experimentally investigate the concept of the driver safety index. The concept is based on the assumption that a driver's "safety distance" between the mean of his psychometric risk- acceptance function and the mean of his psychometric visual- perception function for a gap, expressed in multiples of the standard deviation of his driving-skill distribution for centerline path deviations in the gap, is a representative measure of his risk-taking behavior. Four subjects were used in the experimental investigation. A sequential estimation procedure was used to obtain points on the psychometric visual-perception and risk-acceptance functions. The experimentally obtained values indicate that the methodology seems sensitive and successful in detecting differences among the drivers. In addition, the drivers who exhibited either rather large or small values under a given set of experimental conditions exhibited similar large or small values under a different set of experimental conditions. Considerable differences with respect to how the subjects perceived gaps of a given size were found. /author/

Record URL:
http://onlinepubs.trb.org/Onlinepubs/hrr/1973/464/464-001.pdf

Language: en

Keywords

HUMAN ENGINEERING; ACCIDENT PREVENTION; AUTOMOBILE DRIVERS