Analysis of Effects of Highway Alignments on Driver′s Performance Based on Simulated Driving Experiments

Driver′s performance is an important indicator to measure drivers′ability to maintain a safe driving.In or-der to study the impact of highway alignments on the transversal and longitudinal driving performance,a set of simulated driving experiments are designed and carried out.The experiment road was divided into several segments according to ge-ometry.Taking driving speed and lane offset as performance indicators,statistical analysis is used to study the variation of driving performance on different road segments.The experimental results indicate that driving speed increases slightly along with the increase of curve radius;the driving speed increases first and then decreased along with the increase of gra-dient at downhill sections;lateral offset does not significantly change under different road alignments and lane offsets are affected by multiple factors,such as driving experience,driving speed and highway alignment.This study may serve as a reference for the"customized" road alignment design.