How to Measure Driver’s Route Familiarity

Route familiarity is greatly associated with driver behavior and road traffic safety. This study aims at developing a method for measuring route familiarity by proposing a measurement which considers the driver’s familiarity and forgetting value of the route. The first step is to initialize the route familiarity value considering previous driving experience on routes similar to the studied route. The second step is to update the value, considering the factors of driver’s learning during the total travelling time, and the forgetting value during the time interval. The more previous experience the driver has, results in a higher value for driver’s learning of the studied route. When the value of experience is small, an increase in this variable will result in a larger increase in the route familiarity value. While, an increase of the route familiarity value, when it is smaller, results in a greater increase for the value of experience.