This chapter presents the human behaviour and traffic safety aspects of the European Community's DRIVE I programme, in the context of Europe's increasing transport problems. DRIVE I offers a new approach to improve road safety through applications of advanced transport telematics (ATT). General methods for systems analysis provide indications about general problems affecting safety, and help identify functions that should be improved to increase safety. Specific methods for human reliability studies provide a more precise insight into the human information processing cycle for different road users' tasks. DRIVE I's projects on human behaviour and traffic safety can be subdivided into four groups: (1) hazard and accidentanalysis and identification of the functions to be improved; (2) human behaviour analysis and the impact of new technologies; (3) driver surveillance and data recording; (4) system safety. On the project level, the results of this programme will provide better insights into the available knowledge and tools to: (1) define new systems to improve individual and total road safety; (2) understand the effects of existing ATT systems on various driver tasks and populations, and choose those that can help realise specific tasks; (3) gain experience on the specification and design of new systems, based on a solid ergonomic analysis. On the inter-project level, the programme has resulted in guidelines for system safety, man-machine interaction, and traffic safety systems.
Abstract