Human Factors in Traffic Safety for Highway and Traffic Engineers

Human Factors in Traffic Safety for Highway and Traffic Engineers provides human factors principles and findings to allow nonexperts to consider the road user’s capabilities and limitations more effectively into the practice of design, operations, and safety. It provides data and insights 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.
This 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 driver information perception and processing, including 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. 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 and describes in detail the existing methods to evaluate human factors during safety assessments.
This is a valuable resource for professionals in highway and traffic engineering, researchers, policymakers, urban planners, and students to understand how human factors contribute to traffic incidents and how to mitigate these through design and operational strategies.

• Combines theory and empirical evidence with practical value, giving readers the necessary background as well as practical solutions and actionable data
• Translates complex psychological terminology and academic findings into accessible insights, helping practitioners to integrate human-centered design principles effectively into their projects
• Provides practitioners with enhanced analytic tools for traffic safety evaluation and development of effective safety countermeasures