Effects of Rubbernecking Phenomena Towards Vehicle Deceleration Rate Due to Primary Accident Location by Implementing Safety Incident Screens for Improvement of Human Behaviour Alteration in Penang's Urban Road System

This research is aimed to investigate the effects of rubbernecking phenomena towards vehicle deceleration rate due to primary accident in urban area. Through simulation of accident on the selected roads, 4 cases of study were emphasized to validate the effectiveness of safety incident screens as road barrier, which are current road traffic without accident, accident without incident screen, accident with incident screen (no sign) and accident with incident screen (‘CAUTION’ sign). By adopting chase car method, speed-time data was collected by specifying 200 m of straight road for normal traffic zone and 200 m of rubbernecking zone respectively to assess the vehicle deceleration rate. Results show that the vehicle deceleration rate is higher in rubbernecking zone (up to − 1.71 km/h/s) in comparison with normal traffic zone (up to — 1.55 km/h/s). By setting up safety incident screens, the vehicle deceleration rate is proven to be reduced (as low as — 0.97 km/h/s). The results obtained is anticipated to be benefical in Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) technology as an input for braking capacity exclusively when there is an accident in heavy traffic.