Empirics of multianticipative car-following behavior

This paper considers multianticipative car-following behavior (i.e., driver behavior that includes responses to multiple vehicles ahead). Two well-known models incorporating multivehicle stimuli (Bexelius and Lenz) are recalled, and various modifications are proposed to improve their performance. With vehicle trajectories for a motorway collected from a helicopter and a newly developed approach to parameter identification, new empirical evidence of multianticipative car-following is provided with estimates of the driver-specific parameters of the considered multianticipative car-following models. In doing so, one can investigate the nature of multileader stimuli, including insights into the number of vehicles ahead to which drivers react and the kind of stimuli to which drivers respond. Large interdriver variability in multileader driving behavior is also presented. In the last part of the paper, implications of the research findings for microscopic modeling are discussed.