Experimental Data of 20 Drivers

Exit Advance Guide Signs play an important role in driving safety on highway tunnels. With the increase of mountain highway in recent 10 years, how to set exit advance guide signs inside the mountain highway tunnels become a new problem in China. The paper highlighted the influence of exit advance guide signs on the driver’s eye movement in the mountainous highway tunnel. Specially, exit advance guide signs in the mountainous highway tunnel were divided into two separate signs: one was location sign, which set on the top of tunnels by Chinese characters with height of 40 cm and width of 20 cm; the other was distance sign, which set  62.6 m away the location sign, with a character height and width of 1.5 m, and a total sign length of 22.5 m. Six schemes of different height, width and spacing were tested, in which the distance sign was on the left or right wall of the tunnel, and the vehicle was on the left lane. A Markov chain was used to analyze the driver’s eye movement characteristics to evaluate the effect of separate guide signs. The results were as follows: when the distance sign was set on the left wall, the scheme with height, width and spacing of 1.5m was the best choice. When the distance sign was set on the right wall, the scheme with height, width and spacing of 2m was the best choice.This study can optimize exit advance guide signs setting in the mountainous highway tunnel, then contributing to reduced traffic accidents and making mountain highway transport more sustainable.