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By traffic education we mean all educational activities aimed at positively influencing road user behaviour. The activities are mainly aimed at increasing knowledge, insight, skills and motivation. In principle, traffic education is relevant to all road users, young and old, in all road user roles: lifelong traffic education.
Public communication on road safety includes all activities and products for a voluntary, lasting change in knowledge, attitude or behaviour. There is little evidence that stand-alone mass media communication is effective in changing behaviour or improving road safety. Research does show that campaigns can contribute to increasing support and knowledge of laws and regulations.
It will probably take at least several decades for completely self-driving vehicles to become commercially available, if they ever will. Yet, vehicles in which part of the driving task is automated, for example automated braking, accelerating and steering, are already available.
A safe infrastructure is of vital importance to pedestrians and cyclists. In 2010-2019, 40% of the number of road deaths were pedestrians or cyclists. In 2018, they even made up 69% of the number of seriously injured road users.
A pedestrian fall or collision is only a road crash (pedestrian crash) when a moving vehicle is involved. Between 2010 and 2019, an annual average of 59 pedestrians were killed in road crashes. Between 1999 and 2019, the number of pedestrian road deaths dropped by 62%. Crash risk for pedestrians equals that for cyclists, while for (light) moped riders crash risk is 3 to 4 times higher, and for occupants of cars/delivery vans 7 to 8 times lower.
Intelligent transport and advanced driver assistance systems are implementations of information and communication technology in vehicles and in the transport infrastructure to make traffic safer, more efficient, more comfortable, more reliable and more eco-friendly.
In the Netherlands, licence acquisition courses for category B (passenger cars) are concluded by a theoretical and a practical test. Driving lessons are not obligatory, but without them passing the practical test is virtually impossible. For practical reasons, the effectiveness of drivings tests and driver training is hard to assess in a scientific way. A few studies of the effectiveness of theory tests and practical driving tests are indeed available. These do, however, not show a marked relation between crash risk and driving test performance or driver training.
Visual information is of the utmost importance to road users. In darkness, both public lighting and vehicle lighting help road users take stock of the traffic situation and help them to be seen by others. Installing public lighting leads to a 50% reduction in the number of nighttime injury crashes. Disavantages of public lighting are, among other things, the risk of collisons with lamp posts, light pollution and the costs of material, maintenance and energy consumption. The road safety effects of a reduction in illuminance level on motorways vary according to the traffic situation.