Impact of Distracted Drivers on Individual and Group Behavior of Following Vehicles: A Networked Multi-Driver Simulator Study

As traffic density increases, drivers experience more interaction situations, with a greater need to react and adapt to other road users. Driver distraction as an impairment on road safety and traffic efficiency has been widely discussed. How distracted drivers affect the performance of other drivers and vehicle platoons in traffic flow, however, remains underexplored. This study examines the impact of a low-taskload distraction (cellphone-texting task) not only on the specific distracted driver’s behavior, but also how this behavior influences other drivers, individually and collectively as a group, through a networked driving simulation platform. The concept of interactive driving and implications of virtual environments using a networked multi-driver simulation platform were the two major facilitating factors for carrying out this study. The performance indicators from 12 driver groups (three drivers per group) in a car-following situation with a distracted driver involved are analyzed and compared with a no-distraction trial. The results presented show that the impacts of a phone-texting distraction in traffic flow differ when observing drivers individually or as a four-driver platoon. This implementation has the potential to lay a foundation for continued interactive driving experiment design and can serve as an experimental tool for new vehicle technology applications that consider collective vehicle behavior.

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