LAUSR

Abstract Human factor is the primary cause of traffic accidents. From this perspective, analysing drivers’ behaviour is fundamental for improving road safety. Many studies have focused on the analysis of human behaviour in terms of driving style, and particularly on the aggressive style. In this paper, we propose a survey aimed to investigate how drivers’ physical and emotional conditions affect their driving behaviour. We addressed to a sample of drivers a questionnaire aimed to collect information about their driving conditions and style, which had to be defined by the same driver as aggressive or cautious. The database is interesting because all the drivers involved in the survey registered the same path run in different days, and completed the questionnaire for each path. Specifically, each driver registered the information of thirty paths approximatively, characterized by an average length of 10 km. This permits to observe the possible changes of persons’ driving style as a function of the different physical and emotional states that drivers present in different days. Through simple statistical analyses of the collected experimental data, such as frequency distribution and correlation analysis, we show the relationship among the investigated conditions and the driving style. From the results, it seems that the self-definition of driving style could not be reliable, being the investigated relationship as not very considerable. In other words, drivers feel cautious instead in reality they are aggressive. A definition of the driving style through an objective measure provided by cinematic parameters could give more reliable findings.