Research On Deceleration Facilities Of Prairie Highways Based On Drivers’ Psychological And Physiological Evaluation

Because of the monotonous landscape of prairie highways in Inner Mongolia, less effective references within drivers’visual range can easily lead to their low attention, relaxed vigilance and speeding behavior, which increase the potential for traffic accidents. People, vehicle, road and environment are four factors of road traffic environment system, these four should be cooperated in order to constitute a complete transportation system. Deceleration facilities, as one kind of traffic engineering facilities, is also an element of traffic man-machine environment system. During the design of deceleration facilities, designers usually just plan to control vehicle’s speed, but not take full account of the driver’s physical and mental state, as well as driving comfort.Based on previous studies, this study takes typical prairie highway in Inner Mongolia area as an object, sections with rigid deceleration facilities (with deceleration zones and portal speed cameras), flexible deceleration facilities (with speed limit signs and deceleration of animal infested signs) and a control group(with no signs) are selected respectively. MP150 multi-channel physiological recorder is used to collect the ECG signals of drivers during the real driving test, and then the indexes collected are analyzed and summarized in different sections of facilities. This paper can provides reference for the design of humanized facilities in grassland highways, the conclusions of this study are drawn as followings:(1) By using clustering analysis, the growth rate of heart rate, LF/HF and HFnorm prove to be sensitive to deceleration facilities, which means that they can respond well to the driver’s psychological changes.(2) It is recommended that 2 reduction belts are more reasonable in the grassland highway, which can not only achieve the goal of adjusting speed, but also reduce the cost and vehicle vibration so as to improve drivers’ comfort level.(3) Setting of deceleration zones, portal speed cameras, speed limit sign signs and animals infested signs effective improve drivers’ attention and alertness, especially the younger(driving age) drivers.(4) Considering the special landscape of prairie highway, portal speed cameras are indicated to be better than deceleration zones in rigid deceleration facilities, which can reduce damage to vehicles with less vibration effect; Besides, animals infested deceleration signs are more effective than speed limit signs in flexible deceleration facilities.(5) The contrast analysis of average LF/HF and HFnorm shows that drivers in the rigid deceleration facilities sections behave more concentrated; And the growth rate analysis of heart rate presents that the rigid deceleration facilities make heavier influence on younger(driving age) drivers, instead, flexible deceleration facilities make a greater impact on elder(driving age) drivers.