Traffic congestion and traffic safety problems are important research topics and many researches are carried on to understand the complex dynamics of traffic flow and rear-end collision mechanism. According to a large number of accident statistics, more than 80% of traffic accidents are caused by the improper behaviors of drivers. In addition, the empirical results show that the occurrence of traffic congestion can be reduced by optimizing the behavior characteristics of drivers. Response time of driver plays a major role in driving behavior due to the time needed by drivers in sensing velocity and position variations of the preceding vehicle in car-following process. Therefore, desired safety margin model is employed to investigate the impact of the time-variant response time of driver (TRTD) on traffic flow oscillations in this paper. Safety margin indicator (SM) are used to analyze impact of the TRTD on car-following safety when an external disturbance is introduced in the platoon. A probabilistic measure based SM is used to analyze rear-end collision risk. The results reveal that the TRTD leads to traffic flow oscillations and is not conducive to the car-following safety. Therefore, it further imply that improving traffic flow and reducing rear-end collisions that considers avoiding the disturbance and removing the white noise in the vehicular communication of the ACC system.

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