Gap Acceptance During Lane Changes by Large-Truck Drivers-An Image-Based Analysis

TL;DR

This study analyzes large-truck drivers' rearward gap acceptance during lane changes using image-based data, revealing directional differences and safety thresholds in naturalistic highway driving.

Contribution

It introduces an image-based method to quantify gap acceptance in large trucks during lane changes, with large-scale real-world data analysis.

Findings

Large trucks accept smaller gaps when changing to the left lane.

Different motivations influence lane change directions, affecting gap acceptance.

Safety thresholds for gap and deceleration are identified.

Abstract

This paper presents an analysis of rearward gap acceptance characteristics of drivers of large trucks in highway lane change scenarios. The range between the vehicles was inferred from camera images using the estimated lane width obtained from the lane tracking camera as the reference. Six-hundred lane change events were acquired from a large-scale naturalistic driving data set. The kinematic variables from the image-based gap analysis were filtered by the weighted linear least squares in order to extrapolate them at the lane change time. In addition, the time-to-collision and required deceleration were computed, and potential safety threshold values are provided. The resulting range and range rate distributions showed directional discrepancies, i.e., in left lane changes, large trucks are often slower than other vehicles in the target lane, whereas they are usually faster in right lane changes. Video observations have confirmed that major motivations for changing lanes are different depending on the direction of move, i.e., moving to the left (faster) lane occurs due to a slower vehicle ahead or a merging vehicle on the right-hand side, whereas right lane changes are frequently made to return to the original lane after passing.