Collective Data Sharing to Improve on Driving Efficiency and Safety

Traffic is a social system in which road users have their own personality and steer their cars based on learned behavior, experience, and familiarity with situations or street sections. The assumption of this work is, that traffic efficiency and safety could be enhanced when the more competent road users support the less competent ones by sharing data about specific road characteristics and providing steering recommendations. This information should help the latter to move its vehicle in a more efficient and safe way. We thus designed, prototyped, and tested a "Social driving app" that allows experienced drivers to collect and share driving data (speed, gear, brake force, etc.) and that generates, based on the aggregated driving profiles of experts, steering recommendations for the lay drivers. By introducing a ranking system to motivate the individual drivers to follow the instructions from the system, the project further examined the influence of social pressure on driving performance.