Avaliação do impacto de condições ambientais adversas no processo de condução veicular em corredores arteriais de Fortaleza

Abstract

As a problem of this research, it is identified that the studies on the impacts of adverse environmental conditions on vehicular driving characteristics in Brazilian urban areas are still not satisfactorily characterized. There is strong evidence of a possible correlation between environmental conditions and driver behavior, so a study is needed related to: if, by incorporating the effects of the adverse weather condition, the driver tends to mitigate its risks, thus adhering to lower speeds on rainy days. Adopting this logic of research, the observation and evaluation of these effects on the driver become an important issue in the modeling of fluidity and road safety performance. The analyzes have concentrated on the highways, which limits the understanding of the effects of the weather conditions on the driver to the urban areas, since they are components of the road system of different characteristics. Thus, in order to collect free- flow-speed paired with the meteorological data and the analysis of the data obtained, the methodological steps presented for this work to be completed are defined as follows: i) Selection of uninterrupted arterial stretches; ii) Collection of electronic surveillance data; iii) collection of meteorological data; iv) Consolidation of databases; v) Estimation of free- flow-speed; vi) Comparative analysis by type of vehicle and weather conditions. It was observed, with statistically significant results, that the pluviometric intensity of the surrounding location affected the vehicular conduction process to develop speeds up to 3.4 km/h lower (6% reduction). In addition, it was verified that the interaction between vehicle type, day profile and day shift studied also had statistical significance of influence on the speeds adopted by drivers.