Horizontal Visibility Obstruction Due to LTV

In spring 2002, the Center for Advanced Traffic System Simulation (CATSS), at the University of Central Florida, acquired a sophisticated reconfigurable driving simulator. This driving simulator is capable of supporting research in driving simulation, driver training, traffic engineering and human factors. However, it is crucial to assess the validation of the driving simulator since the credibility of all the previous researches completed using the driving simulator relies on the validation of the latter. This paper compares the results of an application of the driving simulator that consisted of studying the contribution of Light Truck Vehicles (LTV) to rear-end accidents with the results of Aty et al (2002) who pursued the same study using the crash database instead of the driving simulator as a source of data. In both studies, it was agreed that LTVs can obstruct horizontal visibility for the following car driver and that the sudden stop of LTVs may deprive the succeeding vehicle of sufficient reaction time, leading to high probability of rear-end collisions. A scenario illustrating a typical situation of horizontal view blockage was designed in the driving simulator and subjects from different ages and gender completed the experiment. Our study results showed that there is a statistically significant difference between the numbers of rear-ends collisions for following a passenger car and following an LTV with higher accidents probability for following an LTV. Those results comply with the results obtained by Aty in 2002. Therefore, the homogeneity between our results and Aty’s results and the survey results suggest that the driving simulator can produce reasonable data that are very close to real life data.