Research Trends and Results

What is the road that makes a feel of human priority?
HONDA Hajime, Senior researcher
OKIMOTO Hiroto, Outside researcher
YABU Masayuki, HeadRoad Department, Advanced Road Design and Safety Division（Key words）

Community road, Road cross-section composition, Side strip, Driving simulation

1. Introduction
On 2012, there arose a series of traffic accidents thatinvolved children and students going to or coming backfrom school, thus raised the urgent task of making thetraffic security countermeasure of the school road.
At present, as the traffic security countermeasure forthe community road including the school road, MLIT andNational Police Agency have designated total 1,300 areas
as “Relief walking area” since 2003 and significantly
proceeded on upgrading the footway, enlarging the side
strip, introducing the road structure able to control thedriving speed such as Hump, the limit speed control and ?,but it is imperative to continuously practice suchcountermeasures.
However, though pedestrians and bicycles mainly use
the community roads, almost all of them have narrowroad width, then it is difficult to secure their space
separately from the motorway. Furthermore, it is required
to adopt such a countermeasure that is low cost and easierto prevail as the community roads are long and widely
spread.
Accordingly, in this research we focused on the roadcross-road composition to research the relation of suchcross-road and walking speed in order to understand whatis the road to make a feel of human priority.
2. Driving speed subject to the composition of the roadcross-road
The research was carried out by human subjects whorun through the computer graphic (hereafter CG) image
space under integrated areas along the road using theDriving simulator (hereafter DS), in which driving speed
and driving route are recorded on respective image space
and impressions (s)he felt on running through wasgrasped through query. The CG roads are classified bytotal 23 types having three width such as 4m, 6m and 8m
with or without road strip, different width and color, withor without center line and so on. There was noconsideration on the oncoming vehicle and footpassenger.
As a result, lower driving speed was obtained in the6m width road with chicane road strip and full color CG
image without chicane road strip.
On the other hand, although we could not have a
distinct result on the restrictive effect on the driving speed
by enlarged road strip and colorized road, we havereceived a number of responses that raised the coloredroad strip as one of the factors that have made them

restrict the driving speed.
Furthermore, in an example that we have made one
cross-section of the CG image a still and showed several
stills to the same human subject and asked which was theone made him a feel of human priority, most preferred
one was the motorway of 2m with road strips 2m X 2 forthe case of 6m road (Left bottom of the Fig. 1).

Fig. Examples of CG images used for the DS research(Width 6m)
Left top: Chicane road strip（1m・2m）, Right top: Full color road, Leftbottom: Road strip 2m X 2, motorway 2m, Right bottom: Road strip
1m X 2, motorway 4m

3. Future deployment
We are to continuously observe the driving speed on
the actual road of similar condition without affected by
the foot passenger and oncoming vehicle so as to make asummary of the relation with the cross road composition
and make comparison with the DS research.
At present, as several examples have shown effect of
the enlarged and/or colored road strip, we are willingly tomake clear which cross road composition is the mosteffective to restrict the driving speed and support thetraffic safety countermeasure if the community road thatis effective and having better efficiency.
【Reference】
1) Research on the Driving speed variation due to difference ofthe road factor composition” by OKIMOTO Hiroto, HONDA
Hajime, TAKAMIYA Susumu in the 32nd Traffic engineeringresearch presentation papers, September 2012