Car-following Behavior of Chinese Drivers

The number of novice drivers has increased rapidly in recent years in China, and Chinese novice drivers have become the high-risk population in traffic accidents. But the behavioral differences between experienced drivers and novice drivers remain poorly understood in China. This study is a detailed description of the following distances of drivers based on the experimental data collected by instrumented vehicle. The instrumented vehicle installed with GPS, laser rangefinder, video camera, and some other sensors to collect the time series data of car-following behavior, and the locally weighted scatter plot smoothing method was employed to process the trajectories of vehicles. Then the following distances of Chinese experienced drivers and novice drivers on different roads (arterial road, expressway) and in different traffic flows (rush hours, non-rush hours) were analyzed and discussed. Through the analysis, the following conclusions were drawn. The following distances met the lognormal distribution. The mean and standard deviation of the following distances increased with the speed. Generally, the car-following behaviors of novice drivers were prone to be influenced by road type and traffic flow, characterized as a significantly larger following distance and violent fluctuations of following distance on the expressway and in rush hours, while the influence of road types and traffic flow on experienced drivers was relatively weaker. Novice drivers had larger following distances and more violent fluctuation than those of experienced drivers, and this difference was more significant on the expressway.