Accident Analysis and Sustainable Road Safety Research
A special issue of Sustainability (ISSN 2071-1050). This special issue belongs to the section "Sustainable Transportation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (30 November 2021) | Viewed by 12266
Special Issue Editor
Interests: road design; road safety; building information modeling (BIM); connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs); vulnerable road users (VRUs); data collection
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
In order to prevent road accidents, it is of utmost importance to examine what causes them. Researchers have created different classification systems, grouping these causes into a set of “concurrent factors”. One of the most accepted classifications distinguishes three of them: human, infrastructure, and vehicle factors.
When it comes to reducing road crashes, very important achievements have been obtained through interventions on infrastructure and vehicle factors. Actions have also been applied to the human factor with high success as well, but the crash outcomes have reached a point in which new actions have little additional effect.
New safety approaches—such as the safe system approach, vision zero, or sustainable road safety—assume that humans are not perfect and make mistakes, which can partially explain why traditional safety approaches are becoming less effective.
The Sustainable Road Safety approach was developed in the Netherlands in the 1990s and updated twice since. In it, the environment is actively adapted to prevent serious crashes, focusing on the human perspective. In the latest update (2018), this is carried out by means of three design principles and two organization principles.
The design principles are:
- Functionality of roads. Road segments can be basically divided into two possible functions: traffic flow (users do not interact with the environment) or exchange (interaction does exist, as well as abrupt maneuvers).
- (Bio)mechanics. It is well known that speed variation is not very safe. Therefore, uniformity in speed, directions, mass and size of the road users is encouraged. This principle is specially focused on the protection of vulnerable road users (VRUs).
- Psychological factors. The traffic environment and information are adapted to a variety of users. Not only is the road environment adapted to the users, but adaptation works in the opposite direction too through education and enforcement.
The organization principles are:
- Responsibilities are clear for the different agents involved in traffic planning and management, pursuing the highest safety levels.
- Learning and innovating. The system is always under review, in order to incorporate the most recent research as well as outcomes of recent implementations.
In this Special Issue, articles about the effective application of Sustainable Road Safety approach are welcome. This includes—but it is not limited to—these topics:
- Specific implementation of the SRS principles on a real scenario
- Adaptation of a road facility to vulnerable road users
- Accident analyses using this approach
- Before/after analysis of accidents after applying this approach
- Evolution of general trends with and without the application of this approach
- Education and enforcement measures using SRS
- Limitations of the Sustainable Road Safety approach
- How connected and autonomous vehicles can contribute to the SRS approach
Dr. Francisco Javier Camacho-Torregrosa
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
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Keywords
- sustainable road safety
- road accident
- Vision Zero
- contributing factors
- accidents
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