Overview: The SHRP 2 Naturalistic Driving Study
Website: InSight SHRP 2 NDS
Driving behavior is a critical factor in nearly all traffic crashes. Driver impairment—primarily due to alcohol—and driver inattention, distraction, drowsiness, and judgment-related errors are believed to be responsible for significant increases in crash risk. After-the-fact crash investigations, however, cannot determine accurately a driver’s behavior before the crash.
The central goal of the Naturalistic Driving Study (NDS) for the second Strategic Highway Research Program (SHRP 2) is to address the role of driver performance and behavior in traffic safety.1 This involves understanding how the driver interacts with and adapts to the vehicle, the traffic environment, roadway characteristics, traffic control devices, and other environmental features. The NDS also provides the means to assess the changes in collision risk associated with each of these factors and their interactions.(From The SHRP 2 Naturalistic Driving Study)
Data collected included vehicle speed, acceleration, and braking; vehicle controls, when available; lane position; forward radar; and video views forward, to the rear, and on the driver’s face and hands. The NDS data file contains approximately 35 million vehicle miles, 5.4 million trips, 2,705 near-crashes, 1,541 crashes, and more than 1 million hours of video. Altogether, these amount to 2 petabytes of data—“big data” by any definition. (2015 info from Big Data Hit the Road: The First Year of Use of the SHRP2 Safety Databases)
