INTERPRETATION OF ROADWAY DESIGNS BY AN ANALYSIS OF DRIVER'S VISUAL SCANNING AND DRIVING BEHAVIOUR ON STRAIGHT AND CURVED ROADWAY SECTIONS

The design of roadways, viaducts, complex roadway intersections, etc. can be visualized. In addition to the interpretation of the aesthetics of the design it may be necessary to analyze possible consequences for the driving and visual scanning behaviour of drivers. It would have been desirable for scientific investigation to have resulted in directives with regard to minimum preview, maximum lateral acceleration, minimum distance between sucessive points of information, etc. Then, new roadway designs could be related to this available knowledge. However there is a shortage of literature on these points. This report discusses these problems based on an actual roadway and a request for evaluating roadway designs (photos in a roadway's scale model). Besides the experimental results general questions about instrumentation and methodology are discussed. Part 1 of this report gives a review of the literature on possible techniques to visualize and interpret roadway designs. Part 2 and 3 of the report describe driver's visual scanning and driving behaviour on some straight and curved roadway sections of the intersection "Vaanplein" near Rotterdam. /TRRL/