Engineering Commons^™

Safety And Operational Assessment Of Gap Acceptance Through Large-Scale Field Evaluation, Steven Maxwell Tupper

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Given that “driver error” is cited as a contributing factor in 93 percent of all crashes, understanding driver behavior is an essential element in mitigating the crash problem. Among the more dangerous roadway elements are unsignalized intersections where drivers’ gap acceptance behavior is strongly correlated to the operational and safety performance of the intersection. While a basic understanding of drivers’ gap acceptance behavior exists, several unanswered questions remain.

Previous work has attempted to address some of these questions, however to date the research has been somewhat limited in scope and scale due to the challenges of collecting high fidelity gap …