Car following behaviour has road safety implications. The idea of identifying those vehicles that were captured being in a close-following instance through Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) technology was the motive of the research. The present paper attempts to investigate whether meaningful interpretation of time headways is possible when vehicle identities are taken into account. Using a set of ANPR data collected in Thurles, Republic of Ireland, a number of empirical observations, which deserve further attention, were made. It was found that the distribution of headways with respect to time was more skewed towards the left compared with the overall distribution of all data which had no particular reference to the vehicle identities. It was also interesting to show preliminarily that the standard deviation of the time headways (with vehicle identities taken into consideration) was smaller than the spread of the randomly picked headways from the overall population. As a result, the need for further research to explore the issue more from both academic studies’ and enforcement bodies’ points of view is highlighted. (Author/publisher).
Samenvatting