Accidents in Platoons of Vehicles

Summary

In dense vehicular traffic cars often drive at close distances, they form clusters or platoons. Within these platoons, time headways are observed, which are often even shorter than the reaction time of the drivers - a situation which is potentially dangerous.

Here we propose a simple dynamical model for a platoon undergoing emergency braking, which takes into account the individual variations of the reaction time and braking capacities. We apply the model to real platoons, i.e. platoons which have been identified in large sets of single-vehicle traffic data. We use our results in order to compare the impact of different possible regulations (speed limit, minimum headway).