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Sustainability
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Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design
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Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design

A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Engineering and Science".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 June 2024) | Viewed by 10287

Special Issue Editors

Dr. Sanja Šurdonja

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Department for Transportation Engineering, University of Rijeka, 51000 Rijeka, Croatia
Interests: optimization and design of traffic infrastructure; traffic safety
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Prof. Dr. Marko Rencelj

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia
Interests: road infrastructure design and construction; traffic safety; traffic calming; infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians
Dr. Chiara Gruden

E-Mail Website
Guest Editor
Faculty of Civil Engineering, Transportation Engineering and Architecture, University of Maribor, Maribor, Slovenia
Interests: traffic safety; sustainable mobility; microsimulation; vulnerable road users
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Although 2020 marked the end of the first UN Decade of Action for Road Safety, the goal of reducing global road deaths by 50% was not fully met. Road accidents are still responsible for 1.3 million annual deaths and almost 50 million injuries all over the world. The new UN global plan, thus, is to halve road deaths and injuries by 2030. In accordance with this goal, many countries have defined national traffic safety programs that share the common vision to transform the road traffic system into such one excluding all known possibilities for human error and minimizing the consequences of traffic accidents, which can still happen.

The new EU road traffic safety policy framework is based on the Safe System Approach, which highlights a shared responsibility for all road users. The starting point is that the system should be “forgiving”, and traffic accidents should not result in death or serious injuries or be the inevitable price that people have to pay in order to meet the ever-increasing demand for mobility. The energy of a moving vehicle is proportional to the square of its speed, and in the case of a well-designed “forgiving roadside”, this energy will be dissipated during a collision, and less energy will be transferred to passengers, which should result in fewer injuries. The road and the immediate road environment should be designed and built in such a way that free flow speed is safe in the event of an accident. According to this, road managers and designers have a significant responsibility to provide a road system that protects all road users, which can be achieved through appropriate designs of road infrastructure.

Additionally, various studies indicate that the time for the introduction of autonomous vehicles into the existing traffic network is in the near future, which also opens up a number of issues of adaptation or complete reconstruction of the existing traffic infrastructure, which is currently completely subordinated to classic vehicles. This area represents a great challenge for road infrastructure designers and should certainly not be neglected.

This Special Issue focuses on “Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design”, and researchers and professionals are invited to submit original research articles on the following areas:

  • Road safety interventions and traffic calming measures;
  • Human factors and driving behavior;
  • Driving simulator studies;
  • Safety solutions for urban and rural areas;
  • Vulnerable users (VRUs) and micro-mobility;
  • Safety of VRUs and micro-mobility users;
  • Smart infrastructures and solutions for safety of vulnerable users;
  • Intelligent technologies for road safety;
  • Surrogate safety measures for vulnerable road users;
  • Microsimulation applied to road safety;
  • Geometric design parameter optimization for autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Sanja Šurdonja
Prof. Dr. Marko Rencelj
Dr. Chiara Gruden
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Sustainability is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • road design
  • road infrastructure
  • road safety
  • mobility
  • driving simulator
  • safety solutions
  • road safety measures
  • microsimulation
  • autonomous vehicles

Published Papers (4 papers)

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Research

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19 pages, 1373 KiB  
Article
Driver-to-Driver Communication Skills: Contributing Factors to Traffic Accidents on South African Roads?
by Jacob Adedayo Adedeji, Xoliswa Evelyn Feikie and Domagoj Dijanic
Sustainability 2024, 16(11), 4833; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16114833 - 5 Jun 2024
Viewed by 488
Abstract
Road traffic accidents are associated with different factors, such as nonsignalised road networks, inexperienced drivers, a lack of communication skills, distraction, and the visual or cognitive impairment of road users, which have led to this increase in traffic accidents. Understanding these factors in [...] Read more.
Road traffic accidents are associated with different factors, such as nonsignalised road networks, inexperienced drivers, a lack of communication skills, distraction, and the visual or cognitive impairment of road users, which have led to this increase in traffic accidents. Understanding these factors in alignment with road user communication skills can provide solutions that can reduce traffic fatalities. Road users’ communication is predominantly formal in nature; informal means of communication also exist but are not given proper attention during the driving training and licence testing processes. Therefore, this study investigated the communication skills between drivers as a factor contributing to traffic accidents in South African cities. Consequently, 16 traffic scenarios of communication between drivers were simulated using PTV Vissim 2022 and Blender 3.0 software, and a semistructured interview questionnaire was used to collect data from South African road users. The questionnaire was further used to evaluate the confidence level of road users concerning informal communication. The data were analysed via regression analysis to establish the relationship between traffic accidents and miscommunication between drivers. The information gathered and analysed from this study helps us to understand the informal communication types between drivers and establish where communication loss exists, which could potentially lead to a traffic accident. The results also show that the misinterpretation of communication signals can present the possibility of a traffic safety risk. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design)
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21 pages, 7111 KiB  
Article
Enhancing Road Crack Localization for Sustainable Road Safety Using HCTNet
by Dhirendra Prasad Yadav, Bhisham Sharma, Shivank Chauhan, Farhan Amin and Rashid Abbasi
Sustainability 2024, 16(11), 4409; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16114409 - 23 May 2024
Cited by 1 | Viewed by 479
Abstract
Road crack detection is crucial for maintaining and inspecting civil infrastructure, as cracks can pose a potential risk for sustainable road safety. Traditional methods for pavement crack detection are labour-intensive and time-consuming. In recent years, computer vision approaches have shown encouraging results in [...] Read more.
Road crack detection is crucial for maintaining and inspecting civil infrastructure, as cracks can pose a potential risk for sustainable road safety. Traditional methods for pavement crack detection are labour-intensive and time-consuming. In recent years, computer vision approaches have shown encouraging results in automating crack localization. However, the classical convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach lacks global attention to the spatial features. To improve the crack localization in the road, we designed a vision transformer (ViT) and convolutional neural networks (CNNs)-based encoder and decoder. In addition, a gated-attention module in the decoder is designed to focus on the upsampling process. Furthermore, we proposed a hybrid loss function using binary cross-entropy and Dice loss to evaluate the model’s effectiveness. Our method achieved a recall, F1-score, and IoU of 98.54%, 98.07%, and 98.72% and 98.27%, 98.69%, and 98.76% on the Crack500 and Crack datasets, respectively. Meanwhile, on the proposed dataset, these figures were 96.89%, 97.20%, and 97.36%. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design)
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16 pages, 5640 KiB  
Article
Assessment of Design Consistency for Two-Lane Rural Highways with Low Tortuosity Alignment
by Raffaela Cefalo, Tatiana Sluga, Giulio Ossich and Roberto Roberti
Sustainability 2024, 16(3), 987; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16030987 - 23 Jan 2024
Viewed by 733
Abstract
One technique employed to enhance road safety involves assessing the alignment’s consistency. A prevalent measure of consistency is evaluating speed variations along the alignment. A key consideration in this assessment is determining the speed upon which the road alignment should be based. This [...] Read more.
One technique employed to enhance road safety involves assessing the alignment’s consistency. A prevalent measure of consistency is evaluating speed variations along the alignment. A key consideration in this assessment is determining the speed upon which the road alignment should be based. This research reveals that on two-lane rural highways with low tortuosity alignments, operating speeds on horizontal curves and tangents consistently exceeded not only the design speeds but also the maximum permissible design speed for the road category. Consequently, using the design speed to assess consistency on these roads is deemed impractical, and utilizing operating speed poses challenges due to speeds exceeding the maximum permissible limit. The objectives of this paper are twofold: to explore the relationship between design consistency and safety levels on two-lane rural highways with low tortuosity alignments (which have been insufficiently covered in research) and to propose speed-control measures to limit the maximum operating speed to the maximum permissible speed. The study findings suggest that on roads with a low tortuosity alignment, operating speeds depend much more on the general characteristics of the alignment (evaluated in the operating speed models through the desired speed). Further, assessing speed consistency is feasible only with a rigorous control of the maximum operating speed (desired speed). Additionally, a specific type of speed control is recommended, achieved by limiting the curvature change rate (CCR) of the road section based on the desired speed (environmental speed), whose evaluation becomes a crucial factor. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design)
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Review

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28 pages, 1159 KiB  
Review
Review of City-Wide 30 km/h Speed Limit Benefits in Europe
by George Yannis and Eva Michelaraki
Sustainability 2024, 16(11), 4382; https://doi.org/10.3390/su16114382 - 22 May 2024
Viewed by 7200
Abstract
To date, more and more European cities are systematically working to expand the proportion of their street network with a speed limit of 30 km/h. This paper endeavored to assess the effectiveness of city-wide 30 km/h speed limits in Europe. In an effort [...] Read more.
To date, more and more European cities are systematically working to expand the proportion of their street network with a speed limit of 30 km/h. This paper endeavored to assess the effectiveness of city-wide 30 km/h speed limits in Europe. In an effort to condense research outputs, a quantitative approach along with qualitative assessments were implemented. This study described the changes in safety, environment, energy, traffic, livability, and health before and after the phased implementation of city-wide 30 km/h speed limits. The systematic review was conducted following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Results from 40 different cities across Europe, including Brussels, Paris, and Zurich, indicated that reductions in speed limits improved road safety by decreasing the likelihood of crash risk and the severity of crashes that do occur. On average, the implementation of 30 km/h speed limits in European cities demonstrated a 23%, 37%, and 38% reduction in road crashes, fatalities, and injuries, respectively. Lower speed limits also yielded environmental benefits, with emissions decreasing on average by 18%, noise pollution levels by 2.5 dB, and fuel consumption by 7%, indicating enhanced fuel efficiency and reduced environmental impact. Encouraging citizens to embrace walking, cycling and utilizing public transit services can further contribute to a safer and environmentally sustainable urban environment. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design)
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