Influence of highway geometry on driver stress | |
| Author | Ratthaphong Meesit |
| Call Number | AIT Thesis no.TE-11-01 |
| Subject(s) | Automobile driving on highways Highway engineering Driver |
| Note | A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Transportation Engineering |
| Publisher | Asian Institute of Technology |
| Abstract | It is well known that the geometric design of the highway plays important role in the road safety. Good highway design leads to a sustainable reduction in the accident severity and number of traffic accident. To design the highway geometry, sometime the driver stress should be considered in the function of design because it can be occurred when the drivers drive a car on the poor designed road. It was reported that drivers with high stress are more likely to involve in the road crashes than those with less stress or no stress. In this research, the designs of the road median were focused to study because median is a thing which is continuously installed adjacent to the high speed traffic moving lane, and it is questionable that poor design of the road median (in this case: narrow inner shoulder width for raised median and narrow flush median) can affect to the driver stress level. Therefore, to answer these questions, the experiment in the real field was conducted. 80 drivers participated to the experiment (40 drivers for raised median test and 40drivers for flush median test), and each sample consisted of balance male and female on age groups 18-30, 31-45.The heart rate measurement and short questionnaire survey were applied in this experiment. The results were found that the level of driver stress will depend on the inner shoulder width of raised median. Driving on the road with narrow inner shoulder will lead to increase in level of driver stress. However, for the flush median, even though drivers drive on the road with narrow or wide flush median, the level of driver stress is not significantly different. |
| Year | 2012 |
| Type | Thesis |
| School | School of Engineering and Technology |
| Department | Department of Civil and Infrastucture Engineering (DCIE) |
| Academic Program/FoS | Transportation Engineering (TE) |
| Chairperson(s) | Kunnawee Kanitpong |
| Examination Committee(s) | Thirayoot Limanond;Piyapong Jiwattanakulpaisarn; |
| Scholarship Donor(s) | Thailand (H.M. King); |
| Degree | Thesis (M.Eng.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2012 |