Leveraging the Second Strategic Highway Research Program Naturalistic Driving Study: Examining Driver Behavior When Entering Rural High-Speed Intersections

BACKGROUND

In 2005, Congress authorized and funded the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP2) Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) with the goals of improving safety and reliability for motorists and workers, enabling transportation agencies to improve their infrastructure more quickly, targeting and efficiently allocating resources, and enhancing existing processes.⁽¹⁾

The SHRP2 NDS is the largest study of its kind with over 3,100 primary drivers and 3,000 vehicles across 6 sites within the United States. The Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) developed the data acquisition systems installed in participating vehicles and continues to house all data acquired throughout the NDS.⁽²⁾ Data included but were not limited to Global Positioning System coordinates, speed, brake and acceleration behavior, driver demographics, detailed event descriptions, and video feeds to the front and rear of the vehicle and on the driver’s face and hands. The accompanying Roadway Information Database (RID) includes detailed roadway data collected on more than 12,000 centerline mi of highways in and around the site, including but not limited to crash histories, traffic and weather conditions, road type, and present signage. Used together, data collected during the NDS and for the RID can be leveraged for a new perspective on driving behaviors.

Intersections provide the setting for a large number of traffic incidents. Overall, 40 percent of crashes in the United States occur at intersections; a total of 57 percent of fatalities from 1997–2004 occurred at stop-controlled intersections, of which 61 percent occurred in rural areas.^(3,4) Factors believed to contribute to these incidents include inadequate surveillance, failure to obey/yield, driver inattention, and speed.^(5,6) In 2000, researchers in Kansas hypothesized that the majority of such collisions occur because drivers “did not see oncoming vehicles or failed to accurately estimate the speeds of oncoming vehicles on the major roadway.”⁽⁷⁾ A naturalistic environment provides an opportunity for new insight into stopping and scanning behaviors at intersections.