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Brake Reaction Times and Driver Behavior Analysis

Article  in  Transportation Human Factors · September 2000

DOI: 10.1207/STHF0203_2

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TRANSPORTATION HUMAN FACTORS, 2(3), 217–226
Copyright © 2000, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

COMMENTARY

Brake Reaction Times and

Driver Behavior Analysis

Heikki Summala
Department of Psychology, Traffic Research Unit
University of Helsinki

In his review on driver brake reaction times (RTs), Green (2000) rightly criticizes attempts to
seek a canonical brake RT, and proposes to determine expected brake RT for specific situa-
tions. However, based on his analysis, he presents a series of values for expected, unexpected,
and surprise situations that appear to generalize over a variety of different driver tasks and traf-
fic situations without sufficient concern for urgency or criticality of the situations. This sam-
pling problem may lead easily to biased and somewhat arbitrary estimates. Thus, instead of
1.25 sec for “unexpected” situations, the median yellow response time for the critical conditions
(at short time-to-stop-line) is rather below 1.0 sec, and instead of 1.5 sec mean brake RT for sur-
prise situations, available on-road data suggest that in fairly urgent situations—at time-to-
collision of about 4.0 sec—unalerted drivers are able to react to an obstacle by braking at an
average latency of 1.0 to 1.3 sec, depending on site. More emphasis should be given to analyzing
(and producing) real-life data on driver reactions as a function of situational and driver-
centered variables, and of criticality.

Brake reaction time (RT) is a parameter of driving behavior that has not only attracted the
interest of researchers but is also of great importance in road design and accident litigation
process. Among other things, brake RT is used in assessing stopping sight distance, which
determines road design required for a certain design speed. In accident litigation, the legal
process often tends to determine whether the participant driver reacted to the impending
collision within “acceptable” time, in which acceptability is established from a certain per-
centile of RT distribution thought to represent the driver population (or relevant fraction of
it) in relevant conditions.
The road environment, traffic situation, and other relevant conditions are the key con-
cepts in considering brake RT literature. It is of utmost importance to note that reactions to
the braking of the lead car differs definitively from reactions to an obstacle on the road or
from reactions to a crossing vehicle at an intersection, limited-access motorway differs from

Requests for reprints should be sent to Heikki Summala, Department of Psychology, Traffic Research Unit,
Meritullinkatu 1 A (Box 13), 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. E-mail: heikki.summala@helsinki.fi
218 SUMMALA

two-lane road with level crossings, and a commuting driver differs from one who drives a
given road for the first time. Therefore, it is easy to agree with Green (2000) that the search
for “canonical” RT applicable to any situation is neither theoretically nor practically
grounded.
In his review, Green (2000) examines the effects of what he assumes to be the five princi-
pal variables on RTs: expectation, urgency, age and gender, and cognitive load. His main
conclusion is that driver expectations are the most important variable affecting RTs, by a
factor of 2, and RTs are modulated somewhat by other factors like driver age and gender,
cognitive load, and urgency. However, somewhat against criticism of canonical value, he
proposes a series of values to be used in expected, unexpected, and surprise situations.
The first level of Green’s (2000) classification, that of an expected condition, includes
studies in which participants either are fully informed and know exactly what the experi-
menter wants of them or have presumably inferred the proper task from earlier trials during
the experiment. There is either little or no temporal and spatial uncertainty with the stimu-
lus and, in general, no response uncertainty. The studies are experiments either on the road
or in a simulator. This category consists of studies and conditions that measure maximum
performance. The mean value of 0.7 to 0.75 sec derived from these studies does not neces-
sarily indicate “irreducible minimum” (Donders, 1869/1969), because the driver can antici-
pate the situations, read cues from road and traffic (e.g., brake lights from cars further
ahead in a platoon), prepare to stop, move the foot from accelerator to brake, and slow
down in advance. It is also quite possible that maximally alert drivers reach that value in
normal traffic even without such preview.
At the next levels of his expectation continuum, Green (2000) combines experiments on
the road and simulators with naturalistic studies in which drivers do not know that they are
being observed and makes a distinction between unexpected and surprise situations, of
which the former are more common and thus more expected than the latter. The former cat-
egory includes yellow signals and brake light onset of the lead car, whereas the latter in-
cludes a static obstacle that emerges from behind a sight obstacle or an intruding vehicle or
some other obstacle. Green concludes from his analysis that response to the common sig-
nals of the first group is about 1.25 sec and to the surprise events roughly 1.5 sec, which
therefore exceeds Green’s fully expected “laboratory” situation by a factor of 2.
This looks fine at first sight but on a closer look we see that Green (2000) is providing us
new canonical RT values that do not adequately take into account true variation in driver
behavior. The generalization from central tendency parameters (means or medians) taken
from a variety of studies easily masks important variance and is at risk of giving biased and
arbitrary estimates of drivers’ RTs.

NEED AND URGENCY OF THE RESPONSE

Green (2000) notes that not all drivers perform the expected response in on-road studies,
and the obtained RT estimates may be biased because slowest brakers may have learned to
avoid by steering, or drivers may be considering alternative responses, which takes time.
This indeed leads us to consider more closely the traffic situation and the need for the re-
sponse and its urgency.
 BRAKE REACTION TIMES AND DRIVER BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 219

Remember that driving is not only responding to emergencies or well-defined stimuli

with clear-cut reactions but can be rather seen as continuous adjustment of safety margins
(e.g., Summala, 1988, 1996; van der Hulst, Meijman, & Rothengatter, 1999). Just like we
can define perceptual thresholds for detecting critical stimuli, there are response thresholds
as well—space and time margins beyond which drivers do not respond at all because there is
no need to respond. Therefore, urgency or criticality of the situation is by definition a major
determinant of drivers’ reactions.
This is even more important when bearing in mind that drivers learn to “optimize,” de-
lay, and even suppress their reactions to avoid unnecessary deceleration (Näätänen &
Summala, 1976; Fuller, 1984). This partly comes from the tendency to maintain the present
speed, but we also learn—and this is based on expectancies we develop through practice—
that it is not always necessary to react as soon as possible, and sometimes it is even reason-
able to delay reactions also because the need for doing it may disappear. This is especially
the case in crossing situations where avoidant responses are only needed when two vehicles
(or road users) are on an approximate collision course. Therefore, it is important to always
define both the specific traffic situation and the urgency of the situation.
It is not sufficient to report average RTs for a sample of drivers with very different time
constraints. Averaging over a range of criticality, including situations in which drivers have
no need to respond quickly, tends to result in too long RT estimates, and it is even more con-
fusing to compare such globally averaged parameters from highly different traffic situations.
I take an example from “unexpected naturalistic” studies reviewed by Green (2000) that
concerned signalized intersections. Chang, Messer, and Santiago (1985) indeed gave a
grand mean of 1.3 sec (median equaled to 1.1 sec) for all the drivers’ yellow response time in
their study. However, the mean brake response time in their sample varied by a factor of 2
between 13 intersections (0.7 to 1.5 sec) that varied in road type, surrounding speed limit,
and slope. A part of these differences may be due to drivers’ alertness in line with Green’s
analysis. However, Chang et al. continued to model their data as a function of speed and
distance from the intersection at yellow onset. The model indicated that RT depends both
on the time-to-stop-line and distance such that speed had the main effect on response times
(the higher the speed the shorter the response), and for each speed group, distance strongly
affected the response time (the shorter the distance the shorter the response). In the whole
data, the median for drivers at 40 mph or faster was 0.9 sec, and even the 85th percentile was
no more than 1.1 sec with time-to-stop-line being about 3.5 sec or less (at 60 m distance).
It is obvious that urgency of the situation strongly influences response latencies at signal-
ized intersections. There is simply no need to respond promptly at a longer distance, slower
speed, or both. On the other hand, there is no need to respond at all when being so close
that the intersection can be passed safely. For practical purposes in traffic design, therefore,
the relevant range of criticality (range of time-to-stop-line at yellow onset) is actually fairly
narrow.
Here we come across the question of what response time parameters we actually need.
They should indeed be relevant to the real requirements. To avoid bias that comes from in-
tegrating over a broad range of criticality, we should try to define a range that corresponds
to emergency or truly urgent situations that indeed both require and trigger a prompt re-
sponse. For both the academic goals and application, however, it is even more essential to
develop specified and detailed models that take into account both situational and personal
variance.
220 SUMMALA

SURPRISE SITUATIONS ON THE ROAD

At approaches of a signalized intersection, drivers have always an option to pass the inter-
section if they cannot stop conveniently. This is not the case when encountering unexpected
obstacles on the road, at least if there is no space to avoid hitting them by steering. There-
fore, it is neither easy nor ethically acceptable to arrange emergency situations on the road
that would result in emergency braking. However, a comprehensive model of driver reac-
tions makes it possible to estimate driver reactions in urgent situations.
In our studies (Koivisto & Summala, 1989; Summala & Koivisto, 1990) we approxi-
mated an emergency situation through a model of brake reactions as a function of urgency,
or its inverse, available time.
We (Koivisto & Summala, 1989) placed a police officer standing in a curve so that the
moment he became visible to an approaching driver could be determined exactly, along
with brake light onset. It was a forcing stimulus that left no choice for the drivers who were
not aware of the experiment. In Green’s (2000) classification, this was a naturalistic surprise
study. Depending on the speed of the approaching driver, the urgency (inverse of time-to-
collision) changed, while we also varied the available distance at the stimulus onset to con-
firm the results independent of the drivers’ speed. To estimate the truly urgent situation we
defined the available time, indicating the time available before one has to start an “accept-
ably convenient” braking at a deceleration of 3.5 m/s2 that is sufficient to stop the car just in
front of the police officer. (From the approach phase of the traffic signals, we know that if
the deceleration required to stop in front of the crossing exceeds 3.0 to 3.5 m/s2, drivers tend
to pass the crossing running yellow or red light instead of stopping; e.g., Baguley, 1988;
Niittymäki & Pursula, 1994; van der Horst & Wilmink, 1986).
In four different measurement places on open highway or motorway ramps (median
speed 68-82 km/h), the model estimate for the average brake RT of drivers in an extremely
urgent situation (0 sec of surplus time left) varied from 0.86 to 1.39 sec. There was a linear
function between available time and RT, whereas scatter increased heavily when increasing
the time available.
The “conventional” time-to-collision in these experiments varied between 4.0 and 8.0
sec. (Note that the respective values in Green’s, 2000, table do not refer to time-to-
collision.) At time-to-collision of 4.0 sec, the brake RT (the model estimate) varied between
1.0 and 1.3 sec. Clear differences between sites could be found even when time-to-collision
was controlled. Although our model took into account longitudinal slope, the results sug-
gest that drivers’ attention differs between locations so that in certain places they are more
attentive to their driving task than in others.
We can see that our estimates for brake RTs in front of an obstacle are much shorter
than those of Hankey’s (1996) study for a suddenly intruding vehicle at a crossing. The lat-
ter values, given by Green (2000), varied between 1.55 to 1.80 sec inversely depending on the
time-to-collision that varied from 2.85 to 4.35 sec.
As described by Green (2000), in Hankey’s (1996) study participants traveled a country
road at 55 mph when another vehicle suddenly cut across an intersection immediately
ahead. The expectancies play a major role in this case of crossing paths, however. Especially
when one is driving on a priority road and another vehicle crosses the road ahead, he or she
expects that the vehicle continues crossing the road and hence the obstacle will disappear.
Therefore, instead of fast braking, at least an experienced driver typically aims at minimiz-
ing deceleration. A long delay can be assumed before a driver brakes in such a situation,
 BRAKE REACTION TIMES AND DRIVER BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 221

even being in a controlled experiment. Note also that reactions in this situation are strongly
dependent on whether the two vehicles are on a collision course or not. To exhaustively in-
terpret results from this situation, however, exact information is needed on the phase be-
tween the two vehicles, preferably full description in time–space coordination.
Without the possibility to read Hankey’s(1996) report, it is not easy to explain the in-
verse relation between time-to-collision and RTs, and difficult even to understand exactly
the definition of time-to-collision: Green (2000) only mentions that Hankey estimated the
contact time for a driver maintaining a full speed of 55 mph. It is very unfortunate indeed
that most of the few studies made in real-life surprise situations have not been published in
full length internationally. Hankey’s report is not publicly available at all. Two other real-
world studies (Lerner, 1993; Summala & Koivisto, 1990) have been only partly published in
conference proceedings, and as such let many opportunities for misinterpretations.
In contrast to Hankey’s (1996) results from a crossing vehicle situation, our results
(Koivisto & Summala, 1989; Summala & Koivisto, 1990) corresponded very well with the
arranged experiment of Olson and Sivak (1986) for a surprise situation (a foam obstacle on
the road behind a hill crest), where time-to-collision was between 3.3 to 3.8 sec and, as we
will see later, they were not too far from those of Lerner (1993) in closer examination.

UPPER-LEVEL MOTIVES INFLUENCE ON CRITICALITY

As we have seen, urgency is not always easy to define. Even if it can be determined as a time
distance to an impending collision or threat, it does not determine the latencies of driver re-
actions in all situations. Although brake reaction latencies appear to increase with the avail-
able time, steering response latencies do not, at least within a certain range of time. A
change in the lateral space ahead (a partial obstruction of the path due to a suddenly
opened door of a parked car) appears to trigger a lateral shift in approaching drivers at the
same latency independent of the distance, suggesting a “stereotypic” response (Summala,
1981a). However, this is far from being a nonadaptive response (cf. van Winsum, de Waard,
& Brookhuis, 1999). Another real-life study (Summala, 1981b) suggested that lateral shift
of the driver (and his or her vehicle) occurred at an approximately similar latency even when
he or she responds to a pedestrian who starts crossing the road in front of the driver and the
driver chooses the path behind the pedestrian. This obviously requires additional process-
ing in optimizing the path, and adaptive behavior at the tactical level, in contrast to the ob-
stacle on the roadside (opening the left-hand door of a parked car) in the earlier study
(Summala, 1981a).
Thus, lane change and lateral shift operations markedly differ from braking operations
in that the latter means slowing that is punishing to drivers (Summala, 1988), and they tend
to avoid it, whereas an early lane change may save a driver from slowing down when the
lane ends and thus promotes unimpeded progress, and therefore, it is reasonable to do it
promptly independent of the distance. The upper level motivational factor (maintaining of
progress) presumably explains two seemingly different behaviors.

COGNITIVE LOAD

Green’s (2000) discussion on cognitive load also needs some comments. It is useful to make
a distinction between two kinds of cognitive load effects in driving. The first is visual load
due to allocation of visual attention. In this case, the driver either searches for driving-
222 SUMMALA

critical information in a more or less complicated road environment, or is volitionally look-

ing at nondriving targets outside or inside the car. This deteriorates detection of relevant
targets (braking of the lead car, intrusion of pedestrians, etc.), because the resolution of the
visual system reduces with the eccentricity of the target (the distance of the proximal retinal
figure from the fovea) and foveal load additionally tends to impair detection of peripheral
stimuli.
The other kind of load comes from processing of cognitive tasks that do not require vi-
sual attention, whether it be talking on a mobile phone or with a passenger in the car, or in-
tensive thinking. Wickens’s (1992) resource theory predicted, at first sight, that the latter
should not distract the driver too much. However, several studies (see Brookhuis, de Vries,
& de Waard, 1991; Lamble, Kauranen, Laakso, & Summala, 1999, for on-road experiments
without brake lights; and Alm & Nilsson, 1995, for a simulator experiment with brake light
showed consistently that the threshold for the detection of the deceleration of the lead car
grows approximately 0.5 sec when a driver performs an intense cognitive task. These results
were for well-informed drivers who were continuously fixating to the lead car and knew the
stimulus and the required response and had practiced the responses. Therefore, they refer to
maximum performance and are thus comparable to the “expected condition” studies
(Green, 2000) indicating simple brake RTs of 0.7 sec. Although these studies concern per-
ceptual thresholds only, the interpretation can be made that cognitive load alone may in-
crease brake RT in a car following up to 1.2 sec for alerted drivers. In normal driving, the
effect can be much larger.
In normal driving, when drivers share their visual attention, the situation changes a great
deal. Our results show that when the driver is looking at the speedometer (approximately 25
degrees away from the car in front), the brake lights of the lead car contribute to the detec-
tion of its braking very little, and not at all when the driver looks at the midconsole (about
50 degrees away) where the radio or navigation systems are typically installed. A fully in-
formed participant who continuously looks away from the car ahead detects the braking 2.0
to 5.0 sec later, depending on the distance (30–60 m) and initial speed (30–60 km/h;
Summala, Lamble, & Laakso, 1998). The detection threshold therefore changes by a factor
of 3 to 7 in terms of time delay, in comparison to the base level of 0.7 sec.
This means that the whole task changes a lot if we allow drivers to look at some distance
away from the critical stimulus, something they do anyway in normal driving. Of course the
drivers fortunately sample the road ahead at intervals of 1.0 to 1.2 sec on the average and do
not usually glance away from the road ahead for durations more than 1.5 to 2.5 sec
(Wierwille, Antin, Dingus, & Hulse, 1988; Wikman, Nieminen, & Summala, 1998;
Zwahlen, Adams, & DeBald, 1988). Delays in reactions therefore strongly depend on the
coincidences with glance sequences and the onset of a critical incident. In our study (Lamble
et al., 1999) on mobile phones, we found that keying a phone number through a number
pad right of the steering wheel also lengthened detection latencies approximately 0.5 sec. By
analyzing simultaneous glance durations, we estimated that 0.16 sec of the delay came sim-
ply from the visual time sharing, whereas the rest is probably due to accommodation and
cognitive load effects (Kauranen, Lamble, Laakso, & Summala, 1997).
In conclusion, attention allocation over the road view and to nondriving tasks substan-
tially increases RTs even in well-informed and alert drivers. In normal driving such an effect
is probably substantially larger. Unfortunately, I am not aware of any good unobtrusive,
real-life data.
 BRAKE REACTION TIMES AND DRIVER BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 223

AGE

We should take a closer look at Green’s (2000) observation that age effects in on-road stud-
ies are inconsistent in contrast to all what we know from laboratory studies. He cites three
on-road studies in his surprise category on RTs that address driver age. Olson and Sivak
(1986) studied reactions to a foam obstacle behind a hill crest, Summala and Koivisto
(1990) analyzed driver brake reactions to a police officer on the road, and Lerner (1993)
studied driver reactions to a barrel suddenly rolling from behind a sight obstacle close to the
driver’s path.
It is advisable to redraw Olson and Sivak (1986) results for a more detailed interpreta-
tion. Figure 1 shows the distributions of younger (18–40 years) and older (50–84 years) par-
ticipants in a surprise condition where the drivers encountered the foam obstacle the first
time. The results are drawn on a normal probability scale just like in the original article so
that the straight line indicates normal distribution. We can see that the gas pedal response,
the perception time in Olson and Sivak terms, follows an approximately similar distribution
for both groups, the older drivers’ reactions being about 0.1 sec slower. (Contrary to
Green’s (2000) review, Olson and Sivak measured perception time—accelerator re-
sponses—correctly in their surprise condition.) Instead, the brake reaction that follows (re-
sponse time in Olson and Sivak terms), including foot movement time and decision
processes, is faster in older drivers. This was already noted by Lerner (1993), who proposed
that older drivers are more consistent in making a rapid move to the brake pedal once the
hazard has been recognized. It may also be a part of their compensatory strategy: For safety
reasons they may simply react promptly, not delaying deceleration at all. We can also see
from the figure that younger drivers’ distribution is much more sloped so that a part of
them essentially delayed their response. This may partly be due to what Green suggests, that
drivers are making a choice between steering and braking response and so the resulting
choice reaction is longer. As a result, the figure shows that the total RT distributions do not
differ at all for the two groups.
This interpretation of the Olson and Sivak (1986) study leaves the question of the age dif-
ference somewhat open. The authors stated that the speed varied between 12 and 14 m/sec
and, therefore, time-to-collision was between 3.0 and 4.0 sec with sight distance of 46 m.
(Some variance comes from different eye height.) The threshold that triggers a prompt
brake response (which leads to a safe and convenient stop) does not depend on the time-to-
collision alone but also on the speed that determines stopping distance, so at a fairly slow
speed in this study, younger participants may not consider the situation as urgent as older
drivers. Provided that the urgency was high enough to warrant prompt response also in
younger drivers, I presume that older drivers would be slower both in perception and re-
sponse component of the brake reaction, resulting in a longer total RT. On the other hand,
younger drivers may be more apt to search for alternative avoidant (steering) reactions
more often even in emergencies.
Also, Lerner’s (1993) study requires further interpretation. It included a barrel that was
intruded from behind a sight obstacle close to the driving path while all gender and age
groups (20–40, 65–69, 70+ years) were instructed to drive at the same speed (40 mph) and
criticality was therefore similar. The results show no age-group difference but suggest a bi-
modal brake RT distribution for younger drivers, young women especially being quick (av-
erage 1.22 sec against other age-by-gender groups with means of 1.40 to 1.65 sec) Although
224
FIGURE 1 Perception time, response time, and total brake reaction time for younger (18–40 years) and
older (50–84 years) drivers in the surprise situation of Olson and Sivak’s (1986) study, in which drivers for
the first time encountered an obstacle in their path after a hill crest. Adapted from Human Factors, vol. 28,
no. 1, 1986. Copyright 1986 by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society. All rights reserved. Used by
permission.
 BRAKE REACTION TIMES AND DRIVER BEHAVIOR ANALYSIS 225

gas pedal reactions were not recorded and perception times are not available, we can pre-
sume that part of the young drivers again delayed their responses and possibly prepared an
avoidant steering maneuver, which was not however needed as the barrel was stopped be-
fore intruding to the driving path. It should be noted also that only 51% of participants
braked, fairly evenly in all age groups (47%, 42%, and 56%, respectively). Although we
know that women are more safety minded than men, the younger women’s average 1.22 sec
may actually be a good estimate for a brake RT in this fairly surprising condition that how-
ever did not force drivers to stop. At time-to-collision of about 3.4 sec (at the moment the
barrel emerged into view) it corresponds very well to the Summala and Koivisto (1990) esti-
mate of 1.0 to 1.3 sec at time-to-collision of 4 sec. In comparison to older groups (men and
women), this reasoning gives a difference of 0.2 to 0.3 sec in Lerner’s study.
Finally, when we (Summala & Koivisto, 1990) controlled urgency in our study where a
police officer forced unalerted drivers to stop, our data computed over the four measure-
ment sites indicated that older drivers’ (56+ years) brake RTs were 0.3 sec longer that those
of younger drivers (18–30 years). It appears that, in closer examination, all three on-road
studies on driver reactions in front of an obstacle suggest that older drivers respond some-
what more slowly than younger ones—albeit the difference is not large, and part of the re-
sults not easily interpretable.

CONCLUSION

This commentary suggests that Green’s (2000) analysis generalizes over a variety of differ-
ent driver tasks and traffic situations in a way that leads to biased estimates of unalerted
drivers’ brake RTs. It is obvious that to get general central-tendency measures for drivers’
RTs, we cannot make generalizations over situations where drivers have no need to respond
quickly. We may hypothesize that drivers who concentrate on the driving task, avoid shar-
ing attention, and find a situation urgent enough to respond by braking may well do it at the
average latency of about 1 sec in unexpected and even surprise situations. However, when
we add distraction, low arousal level, fatigue, temporary attentional lapses, old age, neuro-
logical diseases, and drugs, all of which are present in traffic, we get slow reactions and
skewed RT distributions even in urgent situations. Further experimental work and a further
meta-analysis is still needed on driver reactions in real-life driving to produce comprehen-
sive models that take situational and driver-centered variance into account.

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