Use of MIDAS individual vehicle records data to investigate driver following behaviour

Atkins was commissioned by the Highways Agency to investigate the impact on driver behaviour of three legends that have been proposed as potential alternatives to the current standard ???Keep Your Distance??? (KYD) message. The study has used an analysis method based on ???Individual Vehicle Records??? (IVR) from the MIDAS system. The headways were grouped into four categories (not following, normal following, close following and aggressive following) and multivariate linear regression was used to identify whether the messages had a statistically significant impact on the amount of close and aggressive following. The results showed that all the messages had a small but statistically significant impact on close following behaviour.