AI Article Synopsis
- On-street parking is linked to higher crash risks, but how it affects driver behavior and mental workload is not fully understood.
- A driving simulator study with 29 participants found that drivers reduced their speed and adjusted their position on the road when on-street parking was present, but still had slower reaction times to potential hazards.
- The study also revealed that simpler road environments led to more consistent speeds and lower driver workload, suggesting that increased mental workload from complex environments may hinder safe driving responses, potentially increasing real-world crash risk.
Article Abstract
On-street parking is associated with elevated crash risk. It is not known how drivers' mental workload and behaviour in the presence of on-street parking contributes to, or fails to reduce, this increased crash risk. On-street parking tends to co-exist with visually complex streetscapes that may affect workload and crash risk in their own right. The present paper reports results from a driving simulator study examining the effects of on-street parking and road environment visual complexity on driver behaviour and surrogate measures of crash risk. Twenty-nine participants drove a simulated urban commercial and arterial route. Compared to sections with no parking bays or empty parking bays, in the presence of occupied parking bays drivers lowered their speed and shifted their lateral position towards roadway centre to compensate for the higher mental workload they reported experiencing. However, this compensation was not sufficient to reduce drivers' reaction time on a safety-relevant peripheral detection task or to an unexpected pedestrian hazard. Compared to the urban road environments, the less visually complex arterial road environment was associated with speeds that were closer to the posted limit, lower speed variability and lower workload ratings. These results support theoretical positions that proffer workload as a mediating variable of speed choice. However, drivers in this study did not modify their speed sufficiently to maintain safe hazard response times in complex environments with on-street parking. This inadequate speed compensation is likely to affect real world crash risk.
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| http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2011.10.001 | DOI Listing |
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