Research On Road Work Zone Driver's Merging Behavior And Risk Based On Driving Simulation Experiment

With the speeding up of the traffic infrastructure construction process,more and more work zones appeare on the road which caused by the maintenance and construction activities.The road work zones not only greatly reduce the road capacity,recausing traffic congestion,but also produce traffic divergence,merging,car-following and other traffic phenomenons.The drivers' unappropriatly driving behaviors are the uncontrollable factors and would possibly cause serious traffic accidents.Therefore,the driving behavior research in the work zone is an important part of traffic safety research.This paper focuses on the research of drivers' merging behavior in the work zone,establishes the different merging signs and different traffic density simulation scenarios through the driving simulator to collecte the experimental data of different gender and occupations,and analyzes the drivers' behavior law under different conditions based on statistical analysis,variance analysis and other methods.Finally,this study analyzes the merging risk from the three aspects of headway,including space headway,time headyway and time to collision(TTC).A merging risk logistic regression model was established by taking TTC as the traffic safety evaluation index to take the drivers'characteristic variables,scene variables and merging process variables as influencing factors.This study found that the vehicle speed and vehicle acceleration,which mainly afifected by the traffic density,have a significant influence in the merging process.In addition,driver's gender has a significant influence with the merging time,and the driver's occupation has a significant relationship with the merging distance.At the same time,according to the merging risk analysis of the space headway and time headway,it find that the merging sign position and the traffic density have a significant relationship with the space headway and time headway in the merging process.The space headway and time headway are both decrease with the traffic density increasing,which means the risk of collision is even greater.In this paper,the minimum TTC in the merging process is divided into four levels:severe conflict,general conflict,slight conflict and non-conflict.The multinomial logistic regression model resulted that the driver's gender,occupation,traffic density,preceding vehicle speed variance,main vehicle speed variance,main vehicle acceleration variance and the mean headway have a significant effect on the risk level,and the merging risk of male drivers and non-professional drivers are higher than female drivers and professional,the merging risk increases with the increase of velocity variance and acceleration variance,and the merging risk decreases with the increase of the mean headway.The merging sign location is not directly impact the merging risk,but it has significant relationship with the space headway,which indcades that the merging sign location also has an effect on the merging risk.