Title: Gap Acceptance During Lane Changes by Large-Truck Drivers-An Image-Based Analysis,
Abstract: This paper presents an analysis of rearward gap acceptance characteristics of
drivers of large trucks in highway lane change scenarios. The range between the
vehicles was inferred from camera images using the estimated lane width
obtained from the lane tracking camera as the reference. Six-hundred lane
change events were acquired from a large-scale naturalistic driving data set.
The kinematic variables from the image-based gap analysis were filtered by the
weighted linear least squares in order to extrapolate them at the lane change
time. In addition, the time-to-collision and required deceleration were
computed, and potential safety threshold values are provided. The resulting
range and range rate distributions showed directional discrepancies, i.e., in
left lane changes, large trucks are often slower than other vehicles in the
target lane, whereas they are usually faster in right lane changes. Video
observations have confirmed that major motivations for changing lanes are
different depending on the direction of move, i.e., moving to the left (faster)
lane occurs due to a slower vehicle ahead or a merging vehicle on the
right-hand side, whereas right lane changes are frequently made to return to
the original lane after passing.