Influence of Driver Eye Height and Obstacle Height on Sight Distance

Road traffic safety is a series of methods and measures aimed to reducing the risk of injury for road users.

Road accidents are events that have an extremely strong socio-economic impact on society as a whole and directly on its members.

The road is a basic component of the road safety system and is represented by the road and the area adjacent to it, which influences the flow of road traffic. Basically, the driver “reads” the road and based on that information adopts the behaviour, mainly speed.

The road elements of the road and the homogeneity of these characteristics, visibility in curves, the layout of intersections, the uniformity and roughness of the road surface are only some of the essential elements of the traffic safety study at the design stage. But even on a very well-designed road, many accidents occur because of the other possible factors.

The road elements characteristic of roads are the totality of the road components in plan view, elevation and cross section.

In this case study, a section of road of technical class III was considered.

The design speed of the road section studied is 80 km/h and the lane width is 3.50 m, according to the technical standards in force.

The study was carried out for design speeds of 80 km/h and 60 km/h respectively, the height of the eyes will be considered as 1.00 m, 1.10 m, 1.20 m and 1.30 m, and for the height of the obstacle will have variable height, more precisely, for the speed of 80 km/h the heights will be 0.20 m, 0.40 m, 0.60 m, 0.80 m, 1.00 m, and for the speed of 60 km/h, they will be 0.00 m, 0.10 m, 0.20 m.