Influence analysis of median type and infrastructure on driving behavior: A driving simulator experiment

This paper describes the results of a driving simulator study that focuses on the influence of median type and infrastructure on attention, speed choice and lateral placement of car drivers. The driving simulator experiment serves as a means to include human factors principles into median infrastructure guidelines. Studied median features include median type, median width and infrastructure such as barrier. It is found that the concerns and related degree of driver’s attention is different under 15 kinds of median conditions. In marking medians, the driving workload is the heaviest and the principal concern of drivers is the opposing traffic. When entering marking medians from physical medians, drivers tend to laterally move away from the road centerline, and they slow down. For physical medians, the lateral wave goes down with the increase of median widths. But there is no influence on lateral wave if the widths are more than 5m. The fact that barriers along the median are not considered to be a risk, with drivers not adjusting their behavior, makes the installation of barriers need more careful consideration. © 2015, UK Simulation Society. All rights reserved.