Effect of traffic density on drivers' lane change and overtaking maneuvers in freeway situation – A driving simulator based study

ABSTRACTObjective: The aim of this study is to examine the effect of traffic density on drivers' lane change and overtaking maneuvers. The differences between drivers' left and right lane-changing/overtaking maneuvers were also investigated.Method: A driving simulator experiment was conducted and 24 participants took part in this experiment. Based on the driving simulation data, lane change frequency, time duration, average speed and acceleration were extracted as key variables of lane change maneuvers; overtaking frequency, overtaking duration, initial overtaking distance and headway, instantaneous speed and acceleration before overtaking were analyzed as the key overtaking variables. One-way repeated measures ANOVA, Friedman test and Wilcoxon signed-rank test were adopted for hypothesis tests with significance level of 0.05. Further pairwise comparisons were performed with a Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons.Results: Some significant differences in lane change and overtake behaviors were ob...