To make a road inherently safe it is necessary to gain insight into the expectations of road users: do they know what is expected from them, given a particular road layout. This study turns the question around: what do drivers expect from a particular road layout in terms of safe driving-speed, traffic situations, and encounters with other traffic participants, and what road characteristics lead to these expectations? It is assumed that, when one knows which road characteristics are principal in forming an expectation, those characteristics may be manipulated to provoke the expectations one wants drivers to have. Since the larger part of driving is visually guided, this study confines itself to visual aspects of road characteristics. The starting point of the study is the Dutch classification: roads are classified according to their goal: roads for all traffic versus roads only for fast traffic; roads for through traffic versus roads for local traffic; various design speeds; various traffic intensities. The roads from the various classes should be recognised by a variety of dimensions of entities: degree of urbanisation, vegetation, alignment, road surface quality, markings and striping, shoulder and roadside altitude differences. In this study these aspects were used to obtain systematically pictures of roads as stimuli.
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