Road user recognition of rural roads ; the role of road characteristics and information provision in the classification of roads. Within a sustainably safe road and traffic system, human errors are prevented by providing a recognizable road environment. This means that a road user can distinguish one road type from another, and moreover that it is clear what he can expect and what is expected from him: the predictability principle. The road user can recognize on what road type he is driving by the road characteristics. To that end, within each road type everything has to look similar to a particular level, whereas the differences between road types need to be as large as possible. It is not easy to put the principle of predictability and recognizability into practice. The National Mobility Council in 2003 agreed on the Essential Recognizability Characteristics ('EHK'), which should ensure in the near future that roads in the Netherlands are recognizable to road users. These EHK consist of a combination of edge marking and separation of driving directions that is different for each road category. In previous studies, edge marking and separation of driving directions were identified as characteristics that possibly add to the recognizability of roads. However, it was not shown that the combinations chosen in EHK for the various road types would really guarantee road recognition. They are, in any case, a start to at least making road categories distinguishable from each other; whether or not this really works has not yet been studied. This situation led SWOV to undertake a study of the extent to which roads with EHK are really recognizable and distinguishable for road users, whether they evoke the correct expectations, and the extent to which variation in layout affects expectations. We also wanted to know which road and environment characteristics play a role in recognizing road categories. A third question was whether providing information about roads beforehand leads to a better recognition.
Samenvatting