Field Investigation of Vehicle Acceleration at the Stop Line with a Dynamic Vision Sensor

This article presents a study of vehicle acceleration distribution at a traffic signal stop line in an urban environment. Accurate representation of vehicle acceleration behavior provides important inputs to traffic simulation models especially when traffic related emissions need to be estimated. A smart eye TDS (traffic data sensor) system was used to record vehicle trajectories, which were extracted to calculate vehicle acceleration profiles. This paper presents the acceleration distributions obtained from over 300 passenger-car acceleration cycles observed on site from the stop line up to a maximum speed of 40 km/h. These distributions are compared with the outputs from a traffic micro simulation tool modeling a similar stop line scenario. The comparison shows that measured accelerations present wider distribution and lower values than the micro simulation. This result highlights the importance of using acceleration distribution calibrated with real-world measured data rather than default values in order to estimate accurate emission levels.