Governments and road safety agencies around the world have either introduced or are considering 'safe system' strategies, a long overdue acknowledgement that different elements of the road system contribute to road safety outcomes. Human factors approaches have a leading role here in both conceptualising the road system as a complex sociotechnical system and in providing practical approaches to support true systems-based countermeasures. This book illustrates the potential for integrating contemporary systems-based human factors methods with modern day driving-assessment methods, such as vehicle instrumentation and driving simulation, to understand and enhance performance in modern day road-transport systems. The book outlines why a fundamental paradigm shift is needed in the way these systems are designed and operated, and illustrates how a wide range of accepted human-factors approaches can be applied successfully to road transport to revolutionise the countermeasure design process. The practical illustrations of these human factors methods are applied to a long-standing road and rail safety issue: rail level crossings, where the road and rail systems intersect. The final chapter of the book highlights the utility of the human factors approach to reducing road trauma and discusses future applications of the approach.

How can we design transport environments that cater to the situation awareness needs of different end-users? This book answers this question by showcasing how state-of-the-art human factors theory and methods can be used to understand how situation awareness differs across drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists, and pedestrians and creates new designs that cater to these diverse situation awareness needs.

Written by experts in the field and based on a major program of work funded by the Australian Research Council, this book outlines the distributed situation awareness model and provides practical guidance on how to study situation awareness naturalistically and how to create designs that support, rather than hinder, situation awareness. The book closes by outlining outline a generic framework to support similar applications in other areas, and discusses future applications in areas such as vehicle automation, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity.

Features

  • Challenges traditional road safety analysis, design processes and conventions
  • Outlines a novel on-road study methodology for analyzing naturalistic interactions among drivers, cyclists, motorcyclists and pedestrians
  • Presents a review of state-of-the-art situation awareness theory and methods
  • Provides practical guidance on a series of human factors methods
  • Describes a framework to support the design of transport environments
  • Evaluates new intersection concepts that encompass features designed to prevent collisions at intersections

It’s a widely recognised trend that powered-two-wheelers' (PTWs) use has been steadily increasing and is projected to increase further. While providing benefits to the community in the form of reduced traffic congestion and environmental benefits, the risks to PTW riders remain and visibility will always be a key issue. Increasing Motorcycle Conspicuity aims to illustrate how driving simulation, field studies and laboratory experiments can be used to improve rider safety through the design and evaluation of a range of safety measures. The book outlines the factors that contribute to PTW visibility and detection by car drivers, and presents case studies to illustrate how the various methods can be used to explore the contribution of these factors. The final chapter of the book highlights the utility of a simulation-based approach to improving PTW safety and discusses this method’s future applications. The case studies collected within the volume cover phases of the design of conspicuity treatments and provide a broad spectrum of empirical strategies for assessing the interventions. The book is most directly relevant to researchers and applied scientists from the fields of traffic/transportation psychology and human factors, as well as to practitioners from the traffic safety sector.