The Relationship between Road Characteristics and Speed Collected from Floating Car Data

Speed is of great importance to the safety level of a road. Speed choice is strongly influenced by the road environment and the drivers’ assessment of safe speed level at a specific location. This paper presents an analysis of the relationships between speed and road characteristics and speed and driver characteristics. The analysis is based on big data on speed and driver characteristics combined with data on road characteristics on 49 secondary rural two-lane roads in Denmark. Data is modelled using multivariate linear regression. The results show a primarily influence from road and shoulder width, the extent of road markings and the section lengths on speed. Secondly, they also show the presence of woodland and intersections influencing speed as gender, age of vehicle and time of day do.