Better safe than sorry

While humans are often held accountable for road crashes, human drivers should also be credited for maintaining a traffic system that is safe most of the time. With the anticipated arrival of fully automated vehicles (AVs), understanding how humans navigate traffic safely and efficiently becomes even more important. Automation will not only replace human errors but also, and possibly to a larger extent, human behaviours that contribute to road safety. To ensure a safe integration of automated vehicles in current traffic knowledge on the differences in behaviour between automated vehicles and other human road users is essential. This report provides an overview of human driving behaviour and highlights ways in which automated driving behaviour diverges from it. To facilitate communication about the subject it introduces a taxonomy of social safe driving strategies adopted by humans. It also provides an overview of the social and cognitive abilities humans use to execute these strategies in AVs. This overview offers insights into essential driver strategies and interactions that should be mimicked or replaced by AVs to maintain a safe mixed traffic system. Finally, the taxonomy is used to identify the extent to which the different aspects of social safe driving behaviour in mixed traffic are represented in current literature.