The Diplomat
February 12, 2009
Franklin & Marshall’s weekly online newsletter
Clearer, Safer Roads
Fred Owens ’72 with test driver Jennifer Stevenson ’09, who was a Hackman Scholar last summer in Owens' lab.
What if roads were designed with the behavior of drivers in mind?
Roadways are built primarily for transit: getting from point A to point B. But what about variations in human perceptual abilities?
Looking to give better advice to the people who design America’s highways and roads, Franklin & Marshall Professor Fred Owens ’72 has teamed with engineers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and the Texas Transportation Institute to study drivers’ perception and behavior on the road.
The team has received a two-year, $700,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) to study how to design smarter and safer roadways.
Road-fatality rates in the United States are three times higher at night than during the day. One of the major contributing factors is poor visibility.
“The question is how to design roads, signs and lighting systems so that drivers can see and respond to hazards more quickly at night,” said Owens, the Charles A. Dana Professor of Psychology.
“The primary objective of our FHWA project is to develop a model that specifies how to optimize road safety at night through prudent use of lighting and reflective markings,” Owens said.
Existing standards for roadway construction are based on good judgment and historical precedent, Owens explained, “but there has been relatively little reliance on empirically based research on human perception and performance.”
Developing a model that predicts the best lighting for a given location will depend on a better understanding of how drivers see and comprehend what they see, Owens said.
“Complex activities like driving involve two modes of vision. We use recognition vision to read and understand signs as well as to recognize potential hazards like pedestrians. We use guidance vision to control the vehicle’s speed and direction,” Owens said.
Under normal daylight conditions, both modes of vision work in concert and drivers can see to the horizon. At night, recognition vision is typically limited to an area within the headlight beam — often less than 100 feet for dim, low-contrast objects like pedestrians or animals. Meanwhile, the task of driving remains easy because guidance vision remains highly efficient even in low light.
“Drivers are not aware of their partial blindness — their selective impairment of recognition vision — while their ability to control the vehicle remains largely unimpaired,” Owens said.
This summer, Owens and two Hackman Scholars will collaborate in new research at Virginia Tech’s Smart Road, a 2.2-mile, two-lane road that has weather-making capabilities, including rain, snow and fog.
The project will investigate drivers’ eye movements and object recognition in various conditions while roadway markings and lighting are manipulated.
A particular emphasis of Owens’ research will be to extend laboratory findings to drivers’ performance on the road.
Parallel experiments will continue in Owens’ “Perception Laboratory” in the Barshinger Life Sciences and Philosophy Building, where he and F&M student researchers test drivers of various ages and driving experience in night-driving simulations.
“The trick, I think, will be to find the right combination of technologies in order to enhance ‘recognition vision’ as much as possible without boosting the drivers’ ease of guidance,” he said.
