Driver distraction has been identified as one major cause of unsafe driving. The existing studies on cognitive distraction detection mainly focused on high-speed driving situations, but less on low-speed traffic in urban driving. This paper presents a method for the detection of driver cognitive distraction at stop-controlled intersections and compares its feature subsets and classification accuracy with that on a speed-limited highway. In the simulator study, 27 subjects were recruited to participate. Driver cognitive distraction is induced by the clock task that taxes visuospatial working memory. The support vector machine (SVM) recursive feature elimination algorithm is used to extract an optimal feature subset out of features constructed from driving performance and eye movement. After feature extraction, the SVM classifier is trained and cross-validated within subjects. On average, the classifier based on the fusion of driving performance and eye movement yields the best correct rate and F-measure (correctrate = 95.8 ± 4.4%; for stop-controlled intersections and correct rate = 93.7 ± 5.0%; for a speed-limited highway) among four types of the SVM model based on different candidate features. The comparisons of extracted optimal feature subsets and the SVM performance between two typical driving scenarios are presented.

Cities worldwide are pursuing policies to reduce car use and prioritise public transit (PT) as a means to tackle congestion, air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions. The increase of PT ridership is constrained by many aspects; among them, travel time and the built environment are considered the most critical factors in the choice of travel mode. We propose a data fusion framework including real-time traffic data, transit data, and travel demand estimated using Twitter data to compare the travel time by car and PT in four cities (São Paulo, Brazil; Stockholm, Sweden; Sydney, Australia; and Amsterdam, the Netherlands) at high spatial and temporal resolutions. We use real-world data to make realistic estimates of travel time by car and by PT and compare their performance by time of day and by travel distance across cities. Our results suggest that using PT takes on average 1.4–2.6 times longer than driving a car. The share of area where travel time favours PT over car use is very small: 0.62% (0.65%), 0.44% (0.48%), 1.10% (1.22%) and 1.16% (1.19%) for the daily average (and during peak hours) for São Paulo, Sydney, Stockholm, and Amsterdam, respectively. The travel time disparity, as quantified by the travel time ratio $$R$$R (PT travel time divided by the car travel time), varies widely during an average weekday, by location and time of day. A systematic comparison between these two modes shows that the average travel time disparity is surprisingly similar across cities: $$R < 1$$R<1 for travel distances less than 3 km, then increases rapidly but quickly stabilises at around 2. This study contributes to providing a more realistic performance evaluation that helps future studies further explore what city characteristics as well as urban and transport policies make public transport more attractive, and to create a more sustainable future for cities.

Predicting driver rear-end risk-avoidance maneuvers in cut-in scenarios, especially dangerous precrash scenarios, benefits the customization of automatic driving, particularly automatic steering. This paper studies driver rear-end risk-avoidance behaviors in cut-in scenarios on a straight three-lane highway. Data from 24 participants in 1326 valid trials were collected using a motion-based driving simulator. An Eysenck Personality Questionnaire (revised for Chinese participants) was used to obtain the personality traits of the participants. Based on a statistical analysis, the candidate features used in the driver maneuver prediction were determined as a combination of objective risk indicators and driver characteristics. A decision tree-based model was constructed for maneuver prediction in cut-in scenarios. The prediction accuracy of the extracted classification rules was 79.2% for the training data set and 80.3% for the test data set. The most powerful predictive variables were extracted, and their effects on maneuver decisions were analyzed. The results show that driver characteristics strongly influence the prediction of maneuver decisions.

This paper examines the population heterogeneity of travel behaviours from a combined perspective of individual actors and collective behaviours. We use a social media dataset of 652,945 geotagged tweets generated by 2,933 Swedish Twitter users covering an average time span of 3.6 years. No explicit geographical boundaries, such as national borders or administrative boundaries, are applied to the data. We use spatial features, such as geographical characteristics and network properties, and apply a clustering technique to reveal the heterogeneity of geotagged activity patterns. We find four distinct groups of travellers: local explorers (78.0%), local returners (14.4%), global explorers (7.3%), and global returners (0.3%). These groups exhibit distinct mobility characteristics, such as trip distance, diffusion process, percentage of domestic trips, visiting frequency of the most-visited locations, and total number of geotagged locations. Geotagged social media data are gradually being incorporated into travel behaviour studies as user-contributed data sources. While such data have many advantages, including easy access and the flexibility to capture movements across multiple scales (individual, city, country, and globe), more attention is still needed on data validation and identifying potential biases associated with these data. We validate against the data from a household travel survey and find that despite good agreement of trip distances (one-day and long-distance trips), we also find some differences in home location and the frequency of international trips, possibly due to population bias and behaviour distortion in Twitter data. Future work includes identifying and removing additional biases so that results from geotagged activity patterns may be generalised to human mobility patterns. This study explores the heterogeneity of behavioural groups and their spatial mobility including travel and day-to-day displacement. The findings of this paper could be relevant for disease prediction, transport modelling, and the broader social sciences.