Publications by authors named "David J LeBlanc"

Collision warning systems can improve traffic safety, while their safety benefit may be lessened due to improper risk compensation or system misuse. There are limited studies of advanced safety systems increasing unexpected risky driving behavior, especially with adolescent drivers. This study is designed to address this research gap in two main areas: 1) it seeks to examine whether and how the introduction of advanced driver-assistance systems influences drivers' risk compensation behavior (e.

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Evidence suggests that older driver safety may be improved by good vehicle maintenance, in-vehicle advanced technologies, and proper vehicle adaptations. This study explored the prevalence of several measures of vehicle maintenance and damage among older drivers through inspection of their vehicles. We also investigated the prevalence of in-vehicle technologies and aftermarket adaptations.

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Objective: The aging of the population in the United States and elsewhere has brought increasing attention to the issue of safe driving and mobility among older adults. The overall objective of this research was to use naturalistic data collection to better understand driving exposure and driving patterns, 2 important contributors to crash risk.

Methods: Data came from a study conducted at the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute as part of the Integrated Vehicle-Based Safety System (IVBSS) program.

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Automated vehicles (AVs) must be thoroughly evaluated before their release and deployment. A widely used evaluation approach is the Naturalistic-Field Operational Test (N-FOT), which tests prototype vehicles directly on the public roads. Due to the low exposure to safety-critical scenarios, N-FOTs are time consuming and expensive to conduct.

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This paper presents an analysis of rearward gap acceptance characteristics of drivers of large trucks in highway lane change scenarios. The range between the vehicles was inferred from camera images using the estimated lane width obtained from the lane tracking camera as the reference. Six-hundred lane change events were acquired from a large-scale naturalistic driving data set.

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This article has two aims. The first is to present results that partly explain why some automobile drivers choose to use their seatbelts only part time, thereby exposing themselves to unnecessary risk. The second is to offer and illustrate the "cardinal decision issue perspective"((1)) as a tool for guiding research and development efforts that focus on complex real-life decision behaviors that can entail wide varieties of risk, including but not limited to inconsistent seatbelt use.

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Objective: This study is designed to evaluate heavy-truck drivers' following behavior and how a crash warning system influences their headway maintenance.

Background: Rear-end crashes are one of the major crash types involving heavy trucks and are more likely than other crash types to result in fatalities. Previous studies have observed positive effects of in-vehicle crash warning systems in passenger car drivers.

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Drivers were asked to execute last-second braking and steering maneuvers while approaching a surrogate target lead vehicle. This surrogate target was designed to allow safely placing naive drivers in controlled, realistic rear-end crash scenarios under test track conditions. Maneuver intensity instructions were varied so that drivers' perceptions of normal and non-normal braking envelopes could be properly identified and modeled for forward collision warning timing purposes.

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