Revealing inherent interrelationships of direct and indirect factors impacting Driver’s stop-or-go behaviors at Yellow-Light

To address critical safety issues caused by a yellow-light dilemma, existing research identified individual direct factors contributing to a driver’s stop-or-go behavior with a lack of exploring factors that may indirectly influence it. Comprehensive knowledge covering all possible direct and indirect factors contributing to the behavior is highly demanded. This paper adds such knowledge to the literature by discovering, revealing, and validating factors indirectly contributing to stop-or-go behaviors from environmental conditions of traffic and roadway geometry. At four high-speed signalized intersections in Ohio, data was collected for 46 h, with qualified trajectories of 1,572 vehicles being included. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis results reveal that site speed has the largest indirect effect on the decision, followed by yellow-interval duration, traveling in the left-through lane, being a heavy vehicle, and yellow-onset distance from the stop-line. These factors indirectly impact the decisions via mediating effects of direct factors, including yellow-onset speed, cycle volume, and following a passing vehicle.