Evaluation of the effect of decorated sidewall in tunnels based on driving behavior characteristics

As a novel traffic safety facility, the decorated sidewall in tunnels plays a crucial role in improving the safety and upgrading the driving environment. The design element spacing, frequency patterns and color, are important elements in the design of the tunnel wall decoration. In order to analyze the impact of the tunnel sidewall decoration element complexity on the driving behavior under different driving conditions, this paper performs a detailed visual-action-cognitive driving task design. In the driving simulation test, three sidewall decoration schemes for different element complexities (character, character and ribbon, ribbon and snowflake) are designed at the level of pattern frequency and spacing respectively fixed at 1.26 Hz and 17.5 m, compared with the tunnel without sidewall decoration. Therefore, thirty drivers are recruited. Six indexes, including the acceleration and lateral position, are considered to construct the evaluation index system from the aspects of speed adjustment, operation stability and attention concentration levels. The significance and effect size of the indexes are explored using the ANOVA two-way repeated measures. The fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model based on the entropy weight method, is used to compare the effects of four sidewall decoration schemes. The results show that the complexity of the sidewall decoration elements highly affects the speed adjustment level, operation stability level and attention dispersion level of the drivers. The results of the fuzzy comprehensive evaluation show that, compared with the four sidewall decoration schemes in the whole and middle sections of the tunnel, the design scheme with the mural elements as characters under the condition of fixed frequency and spacing, has a higher comprehensive score. This indicates that adding appropriate mural elements on the sidewall of the tunnel improves the longitudinal driving stability and speed control ability of the driver, and makes the driving experience more comfortable. This paper demonstrates that a reasonable tunnel sidewall decoration plays a crucial role in improving the safety of the tunnel driving environment. Finally, it provides a theoretical support and technical guarantee for improving the traffic safety using tunnel sidewall decoration.