Research Article Comparing the Effect of Age, Gender, and Desired Speed on Car-Following Behavior by Using Driving Simulator Ehsan Ramezani-Khansari , 1 Masoud Tabibi , 2 Fereidoon Moghadas Nejad , 1 and Mahmoud Mesbah 1 1 Civil Engineering Department, Amirkabir University of Technology (Tehran Polytechnic), Tehran, Iran 2 Road Traﬃc Injury Research Center, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran Correspondence should be addressed to Ehsan Ramezani-Khansari; e.r.khansari@aut.ac.ir Received 30 March 2021; Revised 23 July 2021; Accepted 14 August 2021; Published 19 August 2021 Academic Editor: Haneen Farah Copyright © 2021 Ehsan Ramezani-Khansari et al. is is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. In this study, the eﬀect of age, gender, and desired speed (DS) factors on General Motors car-following (CF) behavior was investigated. DS was deﬁned as the speed selected by the driver in free driving situation. A low-level driving simulator was used to collect data. e CF model for each driver was calibrated by genetic algorithm. Gender and DS were eﬀective in CF behavior, while the age factor was not. e drivers’ sensitivity to the variables of speed and distance in the CF model increased with increasing the DS. e gender factor aﬀected only the magnitude of deceleration which was higher in women. For further investigation, the eﬀect of the desired speed on the time headway in the steady-state CF was also examined. DS factor was eﬀective in steady-state CF behavior. As the DS increased, the time headway decreased. Examining CF threshold demonstrated that women maintained larger distance than men. Finally, it can be said that DS and gender would be more important than age to be considered in CF models. 1. Introduction Driving behavior can be inﬂuenced by the individual characteristics of the drivers and it has been studied in various aspects. Minh and Sano modeled acceleration and deceleration of motorcycles at signalized intersections. ey applied a dummy variable for motorcyclist’s gender which was ﬁnally appeared signiﬁcant [1]. Analyzing the eﬀects of drivers’ characteristics such as age, gender, and driving style on fuel eﬃciency demonstrated that there was signiﬁcant diﬀerence in the driving fuel eﬃciency, on the highway, depending on the age and gender. e results indicated that the fuel eﬃciency of late middle age drivers was higher than the younger ones and that of female drivers was higher than male drivers [2]. Car-following (CF) is one of the main driving behaviors in the traﬃc ﬂow that describes longitudinal trajectory of a vehicle in a lane and its interaction with leading vehicle(s) to keep safe distance through throttle and braking [3, 4]. Studying the eﬀect of individual characteristics on CF is important from macroscopic and microscopic view. ere are a lot of studies about the relationship between drivers’ characteristics and road accidents [5–9]. Improper or unsafe CF behavior is one of the reasons of rear-end collision [10, 11]. us, investigating CF can help to prevent and predict rear-end collision and also can enhance traﬃc safety. Several researches have conﬁrmed that both the CF model and its estimated parameters can vary for diﬀerent drivers and situations [12–17]. Ranny was one of the ﬁrsts to address the eﬀect of in- dividual characteristics on CF behavior. In addition to personal characteristics, including age, gender, marital status, and risk-taking, he also considered situational factors including time of day, weather, and type of roads to be eﬀective [18]. Montgomery et al. found that gender and age (selecting 30 as the threshold) can aﬀect time to collision at braking in following situation [19]. James and Hammit applied the trajectory data from the SHRP2 Naturalistic Hindawi Journal of Advanced Transportation Volume 2021, Article ID 9922321, 7 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2021/9922321