Night vs Day Driving: a new Approach to Design Consistency using Driving Simulation

"The paper reports the outcomes of a pilot study aimed at verifying if design consistency measures based on. driver speed profile could provide different evaluation of the road during day and night driving.. Using an interactive fixed-based driving simulator an experimental study was carried out in order to:. a) evaluate the speed differential during night driving for the identification of critical road situations that the. analysis based on speed during day driving is not able to reveal;. b) identify the most efficient road safety measures, that contribute to improve safety during night driving.. A real two-lane rural road, characterized by high accident rate during nighttime, was implemented in the. driving simulator of Inter-University Research Centre of Road Safety (CRISS) and the driver behavior of a. large sample of participants was recorded in daytime and nighttime conditions.. Based on data recorded on 39 tangent-curve configurations, the following main results were obtained. For. several configurations of tangent-curve transitions, the analysis of the speed differential (85MSR) based on. speed during day driving is not able to reveal critical road situations identified during night driving. This result. demonstrates the need for developing design consistency evaluations not only during day driving but also. during night driving conditions. Moreover road safety measures have been proposed to decrease the speed. differential of critical sites identified during night simulation tests, by reducing the speed in the approach. tangent and increasing the driver’s visibility and perception of the curve element.