DRIVER CHARACTERISTICS AND SPEED PERFORMANCE RELATED TO THE FACILITY

#THIS PAPER reports on the results of an investigation of driver characterlctlcs conducted at the Bureau of H^hway Traffic, Yale University. Information used in the investigation was gathered with the cooperation of the state highway, police, and motor vehicle agencies of the states of Connecticut and Virginia. Despite continuing improvements in motor vehicle accident rates it is generally agreed that the accident toll can be significantly reduced. Research on the drivervehicle-highway relationship can provide information useful to agencies concerned with enforcement, engineering, education, and driver licensing in their endeavors to improve highway operations. K i t can be shown that a small group of operators is consistently responsible for a disproportionately large percentage of accidents and dangerous actions, elimination or improvement of these operators can be e}q)ected to reduce accidents if they can be identified at the earliest possible time. A possible approach to the identification problem involves relating driving record to some combination of personal characteristics of the operator. Another approach is to evaluate performance characteristics of the operatorvehicle combination under varying road environments and to relate this performance to the driving record. Inasmuch as most passenger cars and light trucks are capable of operating at the complete range of speed usually observed on the highway and relatively small changes in speed can be easily recorded, the freely chosen speed of operation should make an excellent performance characteristic to observe. The object of this study was to gather facts on the relationship between free-speed performance of passenger cars and light trucks and the moving-violation and accidentresponsible records of the operators under different road-way environment conditions. Personal and trip characteristics surmised to affect the speed of operation were taken into consideration.