Both safety and the capacity of the roadway system are highly dependent on the car-following characteristics of drivers. Car-following theory describes the driver behavior of vehicles following other vehicles in a traffic stream. In the last few decades, many car-following models have been developed; however, studies are still needed to improve their accuracy and reliability. Car-following mode...

We report four cases of burn injuries inflicted by hot coolant after the explosion of the heating unit in four motor-vehicles of the same make and version, in similar circumstances while the patients were driving their cars. Burns of this type can cause considerable morbidity with an accompanying high risk of a traffic accident.

Does intentional car following capture visual attention to the extent that driving may be impaired? We tested fifteen participants on a rudimentary driving simulator. Participants were either instructed to follow a vehicle ahead through a simulated version of London, or were given verbal instructions on where to turn during the route. The presence or absence of pedestrians, and the simulated ti...

The control of car following is essential due to its safety and its operational efficiency. For this purpose, this paper builds a model of car following behavior based on ARMAX structure from a real traffic dataset and design a Model Predictive Control (MPC) system. Based on the relative distance and relative acceleration of each instant, the MPC predicts the future behavior of the leader vehic...

A number of different types of car-following models have been developed and continuously refined up to the present time, with various different approaches of describing a relationship between the leader and the following vehicles. However, current car-following models are “memoryless” in the sense that the current state (which consists of instantaneous relative spacings and time-derivatives the...

The models introduced in this chapter are derived from assumptions about real driving behavior such as keeping a “safe distance” from the leading vehicle, driving at a desired speed, or preferring accelerations to be within a comfortable range. Additionally, kinematical aspects are taken into account, such as the quadratic relation between braking distance and speed. We introduce two examples: ...

This paper provides a link between car following theory and the economic theory of road congestion by means of a theory of speed choice. According to this theory speed choice is based on a trade-off between the benefits (shorter travel time) and cost (higher accident risk) of driving faster. Accident risk is related to the distance to the ‘leader’ and by elaborating this relationship a number o...