Traffic situation analysis between Vehicle and Motorcycle safety at Malaysia

"Motorcycle behavior in the ASEAN region strongly affects the quality of road transport safety where many fatal traffic accidents, including motorcycle accidents, occur. To develop accident avoidance safety systems, it is important to understand motorcycle behavior. This study focuses on uncovering basic information about motorcycle behavior in situations where they overtake vehicles in the Kuala Lumpur area, Malaysia. The accident pattern among go straight vehicles and overtaking motorcycles is one of the most common patterns of fatal accidents in this country. It will be very useful information of motorcycle behaviors before accident occurring. Unfortunately, such important dataset of information can not be investigated yet. However behaviors at not so dangerous or risky situation can be acquired to understand traffic situation between vehicle and motorcycle. These data also give some important information about motorcycle behaviors. To identify these traffic situations, more than 500 hours of traffic situation data (the surrounding environment of the test vehicle) were monitored by a camera mounted on the front side of a test vehicle that drove around the Kuala Lumpur area. Some basic information, namely, overtaking patterns and their frequency, the relative speed of the test vehicle overtaken by motorcycles and the closeness of the motorcycle that is just behind the overtaken test vehicle starts overtaking, were revealed through the analysis. Regarding the overtaking pattern, most motorcycles overtook through a straight trajectory, especially in a congested situation. However the relative frequency of overtaking from just behind the test vehicle pattern increased in a non congested situation. The overtaking speed was less than 10[km/h] in half of the overtaking cases, while the other half varied from 10 to 50 [km/h]. Finally, the closeness of the motorcycle to the vehicle before it started overtaking was less than 5 [m] in some cases (for example, in case of 40-60[km/h] overtaking, around 20% of distances were less than 5[m]), which is a very short distance, and one that occurred frequently in fast driving situations."