Contribution to the Investigation of Motorcyclists’ Speed Prediction Equations for Two-Lane Rural Roads

Abstract

The calculation of speed prediction equations has been the subject of numerous researches in the past. The majority of them present models to predict free-flow speed in terms of the road geometry at the curved road sections and more specifically in terms of the radiuses of the curves. Common characteristic is that none of them approaches the speed behavior of motorcycles since they are excluded from the datasets of the various studies. Instead, the models usually predict operating speed for other vehicle types such as passenger cars, vans, pickups and trucks. The present paper aims to cover this gap by developing speed prediction equations for motorcycles. For this purpose a new methodology is proposed while field measurements were carried out in order to obtain an adequate dataset of free-flow speeds along the curved sections of three different two lane rural roads. The aforementioned field measurements were conducted by two participants incorporating various road conditions (e.g. light conditions, experience level, familiarity with the routes). The ultimate target was the development of speed prediction equations by calculating the optimum regression curves between the curve radius’ and the corresponding velocities for the different road conditions. The research revealed that the proposed methodology could be used as a very useful tool to investigate motorcyclists’ behavior at curved road sections. Moreover it was feasible to draw conclusions correlating the speed adjustment with the various driving conditions.