Urban Human Factors In Traffic

The UR:BAN MV project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy BMWi focused specifically on the user of future vehicle assistance and information systems. In the case of advanced driver assistance systems for urban areas, the primary emphasis is safety in combination with efficiency and comfort. Research institutes and automotive industry have investigated human-vehicle interaction and behaviour of different traffic participants.This book gives a unique and comprehensive insight into the results. Driver assistance and information systems were optimized for use in urban settings. Furthermore, innovative test regimes for controllability testing and new evaluation techniques like networked simulators and virtual reality test-beds are described including statistical methodologies.

Introducing readers to the behavior of drivers, this title covers a wide variety of perspectives on human factors, ranging from the design of roads, vehicles, and traffic control devices to emotional and motivational determinants of driver behavior. This new edition has been extensively revised and contains new chapters on driver education and driver distraction.

In Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives, mobility experts Melissa and Chris Bruntlett chronicle their experience living in the Netherlands and the benefits that result from treating cars as visitors rather than owners of the road. They weave their personal story with research and interviews with experts and Delft locals to help readers share the experience of living in a city designed for people. Their insights will help decision makers and advocates to better understand and communicate the human impacts of low-car cities: lower anxiety and stress, increased independence, social autonomy, inclusion, and improved mental and physical wellbeing. Curbing Traffic provides relatable, emotional, and personal reasons why it matters and inspiration for exporting the low-car city.

Human Factors in Traffic Safety for Highway and Traffic Engineers provides human factors principles and findings for highway and traffic engineers, to allow the non-expert in human factors to bring consideration of the road user’s capabilities and limitations more effectively into the practice of design, operations, and safety. It provides data and insights from the scientific literature on the needs, capabilities, and limitations of road users, including perception and effects of visual demands, cognition, and influence of expectations on driving behavior. It bridges the gap between human factors research and practical application, presenting complex psychological insights in an accessible manner. The book begins with part 1 explaining the significance of the traffic safety problem and giving an overview of the importance of human factors in highway design and traffic engineering. Part 2 focuses on different issues of driver information perception and processing, including driver perception of depth and speed, driver’s visual search, how road users search for information, and how mental and information load affects drivers’ performance. Part 3 provides results of investigations of traffic crash causation and reviews major driver errors. In addition, special chapters describe the research particularly focused on human factors issues in the major crash types: rear-end collisions, angle collisions, and lane departure crashes. Part 4 then describes key principles of road users’ considerations during highway design and traffic operation. Finally, Part 5 focuses on safety analysis and assessment, as well as describing in detail the existing methods to evaluate human factors during safety assessments. Professionals in the fields of highway and traffic engineering as well as researchers, policymakers, urban planners, and students will all find this a valuable resource for better understanding how human factors contribute to traffic incidents and how these can be mitigated through design and operational strategies.

In recognition of the importance of road safety as a major health issue, the World Health Organization has declared 2011-2021 the Decade of Safety Action. Several countries in Europe, North America, and Asia have been successful in reducing fatalities and injuries due to road traffic crashes. However, many low-income countries continue to experience high rates of traffic fatalities and injuries. Transport Planning and Traffic Safety: Making Cities, Roads, and Vehicles Safer offers a source book for road safety training courses as well as an introductory textbook for graduate-level courses on road safety taught in engineering institutes. It brings together the international experiences and lessons learned from countries which have been successful in reducing traffic crashes and their applicability in low-income countries. The content is based on lectures delivered during an international course on transportation planning and traffic safety, sponsored annually by the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. The book is interdisciplinary and aimed at professionals—traffic and road engineers, vehicle designers, law enforcers, and transport planners. The authors examine trends in performance of OECD countries and highlight the public health and systems approach of traffic safety with the vulnerable road user in focus. Topics include land use (transportation planning, mobility, and safety), safety education and legislation, accident analysis, road safety research, human tolerance to injury, vehicle design, safety in construction zones, safety in urban areas, traffic calming, public transportation, safety laws and policies, and pre-hospital care of the injured.

Many books focus on individual differences and how those relate to traffic safety such as accident proneness, gender differences, age, alcohol, and the effects of drugs. Others focus on the safety effects regarding the vehicle such as airbags, anti-lock brakes, navigation systems, intelligent cruise control and other new gadgets coming to the vehicle. Even though these topics are undoubtedly important for traffic safety, this book takes a unique approach as it focuses solely on the road environment. Designing Safe Road Systems provides the background for those who want to know more about the effects of road design on driving behaviour. It uses a systems approach to allow a better understanding of why and in what circumstances drivers may commit errors. This understanding will ultimately lead to road systems that prevent (fatal) errors from occurring. The book contains an overview of the current models and theories about human performance and human behaviour in traffic that are relevant for all those involved in designing safe road systems. The central theme of this book is how design principles can reduce the probability of an error while driving. The authors demonstrate how knowledge of human factors helps a road authority to better understand how road users behave. They argue that in many cases the design of the environment can be further adjusted to human capabilities, and that safety should be considered a system property to be built into the road system.

The integration of Human Factors in Land Use Planning and Urban Design (LUP & UD) is an exciting and emerging interdisciplinary field. This book offers practical guidance on a range of Human Factors methods that can be used to rigorously and reliably explore LUP & UD. It provides new ways to interpret urban space and detail context sensitive analysis for the interpretation and design of our surroundings. The methodologies outlined allow for the consideration of the technical aspects of the built environment with the necessary experience and human centered approaches to our urban and regional settings. This book describes 30 Human Factors methods for use in the LUP & UD context. While it explores theory, it also focuses on the question of what Human Factors methods are; their advantages and disadvantages; step-by-step guidance on how to carry them out; and case studies to guide the reader. Describes the practice and processes associated with urban and regional strategic planning Constructed so that students, practitioners, and researchers with an interest in one particular area of Human Factors can read the chapters independently from one another

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.

More and more the most traditional and typical applied ergonomics issues of the activities related to sea shipping, vehicle driving, and flying are required to deal with some emerging topics related to the growing automatism and manning reduction, the ICT’s advances and pervasiveness, and the new demographic and social phenomena, such as aging or multiculturalism. With contributions from expert researchers, professionals, and doctoral students from a wide number of countries such as Australia, Austria, Canada, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK and USA, this multi-contributed book will explore traditional and emerging topics of Human Factors centered around the maritime, road, rail, and aviation transportation domains.

Human error is involved in more than 90 percent of traffic accidents, and of those accidents, most are associated with visual distractions, or looking-but-failing-to-see errors. Human Factors of Visual and Cognitive Performance in Driving gathers knowledge from a human factors psychology standpoint and provides deeper insight into traffic -user beh