Effects of Driver's Unsafe Acceleration Behaviors on Passengers' Comfort for Coach Buses

The driver's unsafe acceleration behaviors from coach buses, such as hard acceleration and deceleration, are the significant factors that influence passengers comfort and may cause accidents. It is necessary to explain the relationship between passengers comfort and acceleration behaviors. The field experiment with 35 passengers and three professional bus drivers was conducted to determine whether bus passengers comfort is influenced by driving behaviors. Subjective comfort feelings of passengers were collected by the means of questionnaires. The questionnaires were distributed on board and acceleration and deceleration values of the bus were received from CAN bus. Therefore, the subject views of the passengers could be compared to object acceleration data. Finally, the effect of acceleration threshold for passenger comfort on the bus was found. The results show that the passergers start to feel uncomfortable when the acceleration, a is greater than or equal to 1.5 m/s² and the deceleration is less than or equal to -0.75m/s². Therefore driver acceleration skills should be trained before driving buses.