The main objective of the EU project PROLOGUE (PROmoting real Life Observation for Gaining Understanding of road user behaviour in Europe) is to assess the usefulness and feasibility of a large-scale Naturalistic Driving study in Europe. In order to address this objective, various means have been used, including several literature reviews, questionnaire studies, discussions with potential stakeholders, and, last but not least, five small-scale Naturalistic Driving field trials. The aim of these trials was two-fold: (1) To explore the potential and get a better feeling of the technological aspects of Naturalistic Driving research, and the strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. (2) To illustrate the potential usefulness of naturalistic observations for various aspects of road safety. The current report presents a summary of these five field trials and integrates and discusses the results and the lessons learned. The five field trials differed substantially with regard to technological aspects such as type of equipment, composition of sample and sampling strategy, methodology, analysis methods, et cetera. The reason for this diversity was that it resulted in a wide range of experiences when performing Naturalistic Driving studies in practice; experiences associated with, for example, data acquisition and storage, study design, participants, data reduction, and privacy and ethical issues. The five trials also widely varied in the research areas and research questions they addressed. The reason here was that the trials gave some impression of the wide range of application areas of the Naturalistic Driving approach. The five trials contributed to the identification of the essential elements of the naturalistic driving approach and, consequently, of the important aspects of a possible future large-scale Naturalistic Driving study. (Author/publisher) See http://www.prologue-eu.eu/ for more information and other reports about this programme.
Samenvatting