Book Description

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.