Sharing the Road: How Human Drivers Interact with Autonomous Vehicles on Highways

Abstract

With more autonomous vehicles (AVs) being tested or deployed on public roads, human-driven vehicles (HVs) have to share the road with AVs. However, human drivers may not interact AVs the same way as they interact with HVs. Very few studies have investigated drivers’ behaviors when sharing the road with AVs. Based on a real-world dataset, our study explored drivers’ interactions with AVs in two types of events on highway, i.e., car-following event and car-passing event. The results show that, compared to interacting with HVs, drivers tended to keep a larger safety margin (i.e., larger gap distance and time gap) at high speed in both types of events when interacting with AVs. At the same time, drivers seemed to have difficulty anticipating AVs’ speed changes at high speed, as indicated by a larger standard deviation of the HVs’ speed and a smaller time to collision when following AVs versus following HVs.