Traffic Safety and Human Behavior (eBook)

The aim of the book is to present a state of the art assessment of highway safety from a 'user-centered' perspective. The user in this case is the driver, the cyclist, and the pedestrian. The book will cover driving behavior from the motivational and information-processing perspective, and following a consideration of several models that have been proposed to describe driver behavior, different topics will cover the major research issues of the past decade. These include the impact of fatigue, aggression, personality, alcohol and other drugs, on driving behavior and crash involvement, the various approaches to accident investigation and their relation to accident causation and countermeasure development, the impact of intelligent transportation systems on driving behavior and safety (ITS), and other topics. An important aspect of the book will be to relate the findings from the applied driving/safety literature to theoretical concepts in the behavioral sciences, so that the presentation will be more coherent and make more sense. A tentative Table of contents is attached.

*Includes most recent research in the areas of driving impairments (i.e., alcohol, drugs, fatigue, and distraction) and driving style (aggressive driving)
*Covers studies about driver vision and reaction time and their implication for highway and vehicle design
*Provides updates about the two groups most highly involved in car crashes (the elderly and young novice drivers)

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Traffic crashes have become the epidemic of the third millennium - a seemingly necessary evil that accompanies increasing levels of motorization. This book provides a framework and an evaluation of the research findings to comprehend the complexity of traffic safety and the central role that drivers, motorcyclists, and pedestrians play in it.