Analysis of naturalistic driving behavior while approaching an intersection and implications for route guidance presentation.

This study focuses on an analysis of the naturalistic driving behavior before making a right turn at an intersection. We conducted experiments on a public road and measured driver behavior, vehicle state, and headway and rear distances. The results suggest that the positions of the front and rear vehicles and the vehicle velocity have an influence on the onset location of covering the brake pedal. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was applied to estimate these relationships quantitatively. The results imply that the SEM with latent variables can represent the hypotheses obtained from the analysis of the measured data. We propose a detection method of unusual driver behavior by predicting the driver’s preparatory behavior using the SEM, and possible new application of in-vehicle navigation systems is discussed. (Author/publisher)