What Is the Level of Volatility in Instantaneous Driving Decisions?

Instantaneous driving decisions are made by drivers to accommodate changes of surrounding environment, e.g. maintain speed, accelerate, brake, maintain acceleration or deceleration, or jerk (the decision to change marginal rate of acceleration and deceleration). These varied instantaneous decisions and their combinations result in volatility which imposes challenges on traffic safety, energy and environmental. This paper is to develop a fundamental understanding of these instantaneous decisions by introducing a new index– volatility to measure the variance between individual drivers and regional typical practices. It can be used to describe “aggressive” driving in a quantitative and defensible manner. Empirical analysis is based on a large-scale travel behavior survey database, containing 51,371 trips and their associated second-by-second (total 36 million seconds) Global Positioning System (GPS) data collected in 2011 in Atlanta, GA. Measures are used to quantify volatility in instantaneous driving decisions and to explore correlates of volatility in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Analysis of Variance revealed that volatility in instantaneous driving decisions varies significantly between groups of different gender, age, and associated with trip attributes, e.g. trip lengths. The implications of findings are discussed.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AND10 Vehicle User Characteristics.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Wang, Xin
  • Khattak, Asad J
  • Masghati-Amoli, Golnush
  • Son, Sanghoon
  • Liu, Jun
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 93rd Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC
  • Date: 2014-1-12 to 2014-1-16
• Date: 2014

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 18p
• Monograph Title: TRB 93rd Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Acceleration (Mechanics); Decision making; Decision theory; Driver performance
• Candidate Terms: Aggressive driving
• Subject Areas: Highways; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning; I83: Accidents and the Human Factor;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01518195
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 14-2780
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 12 2014 9:33AM