Study on the Enrichment of Pavement Marking Width and Retroreflectivity on Elderly Drivers' Safety

Drivers' visual function and cognitive ability deteriorate with age, and road marking improvements can better meet the driving safety and comfort needs of elderly drivers. To provide an optimal solution for marking setup and management for a large elderly community, the specific enrichment of marking width and retroreflective luminance coefficient on the driving safety of elderly drivers is investigated through an outdoor real-vehicle experiment. Twelve elderly drivers were randomly selected as experimental participants to visually detect the markings under the illumination of the vehicle high beam, and the visible distance data of white 10, 15, and 20 cm wide markings with retroreflective luminance coefficients ranging from 33 to 420 mcd.m-2.lx-1 were collected. The results showed that the visual detection ability of elderly drivers to pavement markings was significantly affected by the width and the retroreflective luminance coefficient of the markings and the enrichment of width on the detection ability of elderly drivers gradually increased with the increase of the width of markings, but the enrichment of the retroreflective luminance coefficient on the detection ability of elderly drivers gradually decreased with the increase of the retroreflective luminance coefficient of markings. The logarithmic function models of the retroreflective luminance coefficient of markings and the detection distance of elderly drivers with different marking widths were obtained by fitting. The results can provide a technical reference for proposing alternative countermeasures for the design, maintenance, and updating of pavement markings based on meeting elderly drivers' safety with respect to economic cost and low carbon.