An Analysis on Influences of Spacing of Emergency Parking Harbors on Driving Behaviors

Spacing of emergency parking harbors on highways influences driving behaviors and safety of drivers.Few studies have focused on the correlation between driving behaviors and spacing of harbors.Experiments are conducted using a large 8-DOF driving simulation platform to study the correlation between the spacing of harbors and the speed and lateral offset of vehicles.This study records driving behaviors of 15 drivers when the spacing of emergency parkingharbors is 250-1 500 m (the interval is 250 m).Results of ANOVA conduct that the p-value is much smaller than 0.05 (p=5.3e-06 < 0.05;p=1.7e-13 < 0.05) when analyzing lateral offset and speed, which shows that there is a significant correlation between the spacing of harbors and the speed and lateral offset of vehicles.When emergency parking harbor areas are set in the spacing of 750 m, the driving behaviors are more coordinated (the lateral offset is 0.675 m, and the speed is 96.99 km/h).When the spacing increases to 1 000 m, it barely influences driving behaviors.However, in the experiments, the geometric alignment is simply straight.As the combination of the geometric alignments and the traffic flow are not considered, further study is needed in this area.