Car following behaviours on multilane highways in kuwait: as case study on 6th ring road

Abstract

Reckless driving causes around 35% of all the road accidents in Kuwait. This study aims to evaluate the relationship between speed and headway of traffic for highways in Kuwait. The data were collected at 6th ring road in Kuwait for a week. The data were classified and analysed to estimate the behaviour of small, medium and large cars in addition to trucks. The analysis shows that the 33.68% of the cars are flowing in a speed between 70 and 80 km/hr. The effect of classified car (small, medium, large and truck) to the car-following pattern were determined based on the average headway of the cars. It was found that the Small - Small following pattern has the minimum average headway in all lanes with headway of 1.62 s. Also, the maximum average headway is for Medium - Medium car following pattern with headway of 8.01 s. It was found that there is no relationship between the type of following pattern and the headway in which it supports the previous studies conclusion that only the driver behaviour, weather conditions and road quality affect the headway. Finally, a linear regression for data was plotted to estimate relationship of the average headway as a function of speed for 16 different following patterns. It was found that the accuracy of linear regression for small and medium cars is larger than the accuracy for large cars and trucks.