Overtaking on two-lane, two-way roads is often a hazardous undertaking and a significant number of collisions occur as a result of faulty judgement by overtaking drivers. A better understanding of the mechanism of overtaking has therefore long been sought in order to assist drivers to perform the manoeuvre safely. It is hypothesised that the decision to overtake or not, made by a driver, is the result of a process involving the estimation of the future positions of the approaching vehicle and the vehicle to be overtaken. An experiment was conducted in order to ascertain the accuracy with which drivers could estimate the probable meeting point of the approaching and overtaking vehicles. It was found that the magnitude of error in such estimates was correlated with approaching vehicle speed relative to the perceived mean free highway speed. This paper was presented at Session 34 "drivers, vehicles and geometrics". The number of the covering abstract of the conference is IRRD No. 239340.
Samenvatting