Abstract
The presented measurements reflect the primary research dedicated to the issues of noticing a pedestrian in ordinary road traffic from a fast moving vehicle. This is important for clarifying and assessing serious traffic accidents such as collisions between vehicles and pedestrians. Since experts can only measure the distance at which one can see a pedestrian from a stationary or slowly moving vehicle, it is important to study the difference in perception of objects by drivers from stationary and moving vehicles. However, this necessary research has, so far, not been conducted, the reason being that no suitable measurement method has been available, which would enable one to measure the distance between an object on the road and the vehicle at the moment when the driver notices the object. This limitation has now been overcome by using, for determining the moment the object is seen, a measurement of the change in the driver’s direction of vision. A special device developed by viewpointsystem®, GmbH, was used for this purpose. The distance between the vehicle and the pedestrian is subsequently determined from the vehicle’s speed and the time taken to cover that distance. The results were obtained from extensive traffic tests conducted in close collaboration with the Institute of Forensic Engineering of the Brno University of Technology and the Austrian research institute EPIGUS – Institut für ganzheitliche Unfall- und Sicherheitforschung.
Keywords: human factor, traffic accident analysis, pedestrian, range of visibility, driver