Results derived from the examination of geometric details recovered from the diagrams and narrative content contained in police reports suggest that there is valuable supplemental information in these reports that can go beyond the information captured in the conventional crash data tables. For example, from the perspective of whether an approaching driver may have seen a pedestrian before a collision, it may be less important to identify whether the collision occurred while a turn was being executed than to identify whether a turn was executed any time in the several seconds preceding the collision. It is similarly important, from the perspective of vehicle lighting, to establish geometric relationships between pedestrians and vehicles using a vehicle-centric reference basis. Thus, it is more important to know that a pedestrian is crossing in front of a vehicle from the left or right direction than to know each party's absolute heading. When pedestrian location was recast in this manner, a consistent pattern was found in the left-turn pedestrian-vehicle collisions that suggests the visibility of pedestrians is poorer on the left side of the roadway, consistent with low-beam light distribution. A similar, although not statistically significant, pattern was also observed for pedestrians crossing in front of vehicles traveling straight. No such pattern was apparent for right-turning vehicles, perhaps because driver attention is normally directed to the left, regardless of light condition, when attempting to merge with oncoming traffic. In this case, pedestrians approaching from the right side of the roadway are the principal victims. The results reported here provide examples of how asymmetries in headlamp photometry may affect real-world outcomes. They may therefore provide an important opportunity for validation of quantitative models of headlamp performance (e.g., Bhise et al., 1977; Kosmatka, 2003). Headlamp visibility models have been validated against field visibility data, but testing the agreement of model predictions with the right/left differences in crash outcomes observed here could provide a closer tie to the actual effects of headlighting on safety.
Static and dynamic headlighting: Implications of nighttime pedestrian crash geometry
Statisches und dynamisches Scheinwerferlicht: Einflüsse nächtlicher Geometriedaten von Zusammenstössen mit Fussgängern
2007
9 Seiten, 5 Bilder, 1 Tabelle, 6 Quellen
Conference paper
English
Aufprall , Kollision , geometrische Größe , Fahrzeugbeleuchtung , Fahrzeug , Sichtweite , Fahrstraße , Statistik , Scheinwerfer , Photometrie , Modell , Sicherheit , Fußgänger , Fahrzeugführer
Tema Archive | 1976
|Modern Headlighting Requirements
SAE Technical Papers | 1934
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