Studying the Effects of Driver Distraction and Traffic Density on the Probability of Crash and Near-Crash Events in Naturalistic Driving Environment

Driver distraction detection and intervention are important for designing modern driver-assistance systems and for improving safety. The main research question of this paper is to investigate how the cumulative driver off-road glance duration can be controlled to reduce the probability of occurrences of crash and near-crash events. Based on the available data sets from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute (VTTI) 100-car study, the conditional probability is calculated to study the chance of crash and near-crash events when the given cumulative off-road glance duration in 6 s has been reached. Different off-road eye-glance locations and traffic density levels are also evaluated. The results show that one linear relationship can be obtained between the cumulative off-road eye-glance duration in 6 s and the risk of occurrences of crash and near-crash events, which varies for different off-road eye-glance locations. In addition, the traffic density level is found to be one significant moderator to this linear relationship. Detailed comparisons are made for different traffic density levels, and one nonlinear equation is obtained to predict the probability of occurrences of crash and near-crash events by considering both cumulative off-road glance duration and traffic density levels.