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Naturalistic study of riders’ behaviour in lane-splitting situations

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Abstract

This paper presents a naturalistic study of motorcyclists’ behaviours during their commutes in the Paris region. The study focuses on lane splitting, which consists of riding between two streams of slow or stopped vehicles that are proceeding in the same direction. This practice is frequent in dense traffic on French urban expressways and particularly in the Paris region but remains without detailed scientific analysis. In an ergonomic approach, 11 motorcyclists drove for a month with an instrumented vehicle with cameras. The video recordings enabled the description of the driving contexts and the conduct of self-confrontation interviews. The results concern firstly the description of the practice of lane splitting and its significance in their daily journeys. Secondly, the findings indicate the importance of perceptual activities in the participants’ riding behaviour. These perceptual activities are organized around two major processes: (1) an intensive search for information in the environment in order to foresee risky situations and (2) the detection of situations that systematically impair the visual conspicuity of the riders and taking steps to improve it. The findings are discussed with a view to gaining a better understanding of lane-splitting practices. At the time of writing, the results are also being used by the French authorities to improve the training curriculum and modify the legislation that deals with lane splitting.

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Notes

  1. It is also sometimes called “lane sharing”, “whitelining”, or “filtering”. Alternatively, lane splitting has been used to describe moving through traffic that is in motion, while filtering is used to describe moving through traffic that is stopped. We will use the term of “lane splitting” in this article for readability purposes, to speak about all these practices.

  2. In spite of the fact that it is prohibited in a number of countries (United States, Germany, etc.), this has become a common, and often tolerated, practice in many European cities and the Paris conurbation, and recently authorized in Belgium.

  3. We have considered these conditions with regard to the population when analysing the data and in discussion.

  4. The term of "commuting", conventionally used in the literature, means trips made by drivers to connect their place of residence to their place of work (Lyons and Chatterjee 2008).

  5. MAIDS (2003) has shown that the most common motorcyclist errors leading to accidents are strategic errors (32.2 % of accidents), traffic analysis errors (27.7 %) and lapses of concentration (10.6 %).

  6. We can note also that a hazard perception training has been made a mandatory part of the multiphase rider training scheme in Austria by 19th January, 2013, where the most important reason was the implementation of the new motorcycle categories.

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Acknowledgments

This paper has been drawn from the CSC-2RM project (Study of the Spontaneous Riding Behaviours of Powered Two-Wheeler Users in Urban and Suburban Traffic), which was funded by the Delegation for Road Safety and Traffic (DSCR) at the French Ministry of the Environment, Energy, Sustainable Development and the Sea (MEEDDM). The authors would like to thank Carine Pianelli and Farida Saad for their contributions to the project and Jacques Riff and Virginie Gallier for re-reading the successive versions of the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. IFSTTAR (The French Institute of Sciences and Technology for Transport, Development and Networks), University of Paris-Est, 14-20 Boulevard Newton, Cité Descartes, Champs sur Marne, 77447, Marne la Vallée Cedex 2, France

    Samuel Aupetit & Stéphane Espié

  2. IEF UMR 8622, University of Paris-Sud, 91405, Orsay, France

    Samir Bouaziz

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  1. Samuel Aupetit
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  2. Stéphane Espié
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  3. Samir Bouaziz
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Correspondence to Samuel Aupetit.

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Aupetit, S., Espié, S. & Bouaziz, S. Naturalistic study of riders’ behaviour in lane-splitting situations. Cogn Tech Work 17, 301–313 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-014-0293-z

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