Editorial: Special issue related to the 32nd ICTCT Conference in Warsaw, Poland on 24 and 25 October 2019

Stijn Daniels

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2)  

Speed perception by drivers as dependent on urban street design; a case-study

Victoria Gitelman, Fany Pesahov, Roby Carmel

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2):5-18 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2020.002  

The strategy of sustainable road safety aims to match the road design characteristics to the target travel speeds, on every road type. This study examined the speed perception by drivers on collector urban roads in Israel, as reflected in their actual travel speeds and in the "appropriate" speeds reported by drivers. First, field surveys were conducted to collect detailed data on the road design characteristics, travel speeds, vehicle traffic and pedestrian activities on 80 urban street sections, in fifteen cities. Second, a drivers' survey was undertaken in proximity to the areas of the field surveys, to collect drivers' opinions about appropriate...

Effects of countdown timers on traffic safety at signalized intersections

Marcin Jacek Kłos, Aleksander Sobota, Renata Żochowska, Grzegorz Karoń

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2):19-27 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2020.010  

Improving safety is one of the most important tasks of traffic engineering. In the road network, intersections are the places where conflicts most often occur. Therefore, these objects are of particular interest to engineers, designers and researchers. The possibilities of using modern technologies give a chance not only to achieve greater traffic efficiency, but also to ensure safe passing for all road users. One of such solutions are countdown timers, i.e. support devices for traffic lights which show the time (in seconds) remaining before the currently displayed signal on traffic light change. In some Polish cities those devices are installed on...

A large-scale study on the speed-calming effect of speed humps

Niels Agerholm, Lasse Høyrup Sørensen, Pelle Rosenbeck Gøeg, Harry Lahrmann, Anne Vingaard Olesen

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2):28-38 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2020.006  

Inappropriate speeding is one of the main causes for traffic-related injuries and fatalities. Studies have shown that more than 50 % of Danish car drivers regularly speed on urban roads and nearly 75 % of them speed on rural roads. Physical speed-calming measures, particularly speed humps, are widely used to reduce speeding in urban areas in the Danish road network. However, speed humps are often located based on reasons other than ensuring that they have the best effect on reducing the speed of vehicles. Furthermore, their speed-calming effect is not utilised sufficiently. This study evaluated more than 570 speed humps on roads with a 50 km/h speed...

Roundabout users subjective safety - case study from Upper Silesian and Masovian Voivodeships (Poland)

Elżbieta Macioszek, Agata Kurek

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2):39-50 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2020.009  

The main objective of the work was inventory intersections like roundabouts in all cities with poviat rights located in two voivodeships of Poland: Upper Silesian and Masovian, and then performing users surveys of registered roundabouts. Survey research had two main objectives. The first one was to learn how vehicle drivers, pedestrians and cyclists perceived roundabouts as safe or unsafe road solutions. The second one was to learn about the behaviour of three users groups: vehicle drivers, pedestrians and cyclists on this type of road infrastructure in terms of traffic safety.

Driving and tiredness: Results of the behaviour observation of a simulator study with special focus on automated driving

Clemens Kaufmann, Matthias Frühwirth, Dietmar Messerschmidt, Maximilian Moser, Arno Eichberger, Sadegh Arefnezhad

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2):51-63 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2020.011  

The development of automated driving is an ongoing process; nonetheless, certain problems remain unresolved. One of them is the question when the automated vehicle control system should hand over the control to a human driver and whether this can be done in a safe way. What happens if a driver is not ready to take over? Can the system somehow estimate the status of the driver? The WACHsens simulator study was designed with the aim to gain more knowledge about when and how drivers are getting sleepy with special focus on automated driving.The overall goal of the project was to merge data from vegetative vigilance, camera observation and driving behaviour....

Interactions between tram passengers and road vehicles at tram stops - a pilot study

Piotr Soczówka, Renata Żochowska

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2):64-76 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2020.007  

Modern urban and metropolitan areas face numerous problems associated with transport activity, such as pollution, congestion, noise or traffic incidents. One of the solutions to cope with these issues may be encouraging people to use means of public transport instead of private cars. However, that requires the fulfillment of demands that present, as well as potential, passengers have. One of the most important passengers' demands is safety of all operations of public transport. In case of tram transport one aspect of safety is associated with the process of boarding the tram and alighting from it at stops separated from tram tracks by roadway, which...

Visualizing crash data patterns

Peter Wagner, Ragna Hoffmann, Marek Junghans, Andreas Leich, Hagen Saul

Transactions on Transport Sciences 2020, 11(2):77-83 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2020.008  

This paper demonstrates an approach that makes it easy to find patterns in traffic crash data-bases, and to specify their statistical significance. The detected patterns might help to prevent traffic crashes from happening, since they may be used to tailor campaigns to the community at hand. Unfortunately, the approach described here comes at a cost: it identifies a considerable amount of patterns, not all of them are being useful. The second disadvantage is that is needs a certain size of the data-base: here it has been applied to a data-base of the city of Berlin that contains about 1.6 Million (M) crashes from the years 2001 to 2016, of which about...