Washington DC, January 14th 2019

Dr Hirsch of Virage Simulation (left) and Panos D. Prevedouros of the University of Hawaii

At the 2019 Transportation Research Board Conference in Washington DC, Dr Panos D. Prevedouros of the University of Hawaii presented research on distracted driving done by his graduate student, Mintu Miah from Colorado State University, Fort Collins. For this research project they used the VS500M driving simulator built by Virage Simulation to collect data from 203 professional taxi drivers working at a Honolulu taxi company.

The comparison between regular and text-reading conditions revealed that the drivers significantly increased their headway (20.7%), lane deviations (354%), total time of driving blind (352%), maximum duration of driving blind (87.6% per glance), driving blind incidents (170%), driving blind distance (337%) and significantly decreased lane change frequency (35.1%).

The outcomes agree with previous research that demonstrates that driving performance degrades significantly by reading text while driving.