Receptiveness angle: A new surrogate safety measure for monitoring traffic safety

This paper presents a framework for monitoring highway traffic-stream measures using quality trajectory data of mixed (heterogeneous) traffic. The framework includes a new measure that reflects the attentiveness of the follower driver, called receptiveness angle, in the vehicle-following process. This measure is integrated with the traditional measures (distance gap between the leader and follower vehicles and their speeds) to model the probabilistic rear-end collision interactions between the two vehicles. To verify the proposed framework, two road sections in India with mixed traffic conditions, located along the same road, were used. One section has no construction activity (base section) and the other has construction activity. The verification consisted of two tasks. First, to trace the movements of the vehicles, trajectory data over the study sections were developed for three traffic-flow levels, where two flow levels between the two sections were comparable. Second, the trajectory data were used to verify the proposed framework which was evaluated for the traffic streams of the two sections at the three traffic-flow levels. The results showed that smaller vehicles in the traffic stream exhibited a higher receptiveness angle (paid less attention) compared to other vehicle classes. Interestingly, the study revealed variations in safety among the three traffic-flow levels. It was observed that the traffic stream was safer at stop-and-go conditions than at other flow conditions. Furthermore, due to the pre-cautioning measures for the construction section, vehicles in this section were more attentive than those in the base section.