Contemporary Issues in Road User Behavior & Traffic Safety

This volume presents the work of researchers from around the world and from a variety of disciplines who are actively searching for ways to make our roadways a safer and more pleasant place to be. Although behavioural scientists have long been interested in learning about what drivers do the study of driving behaviour has only recently attracted the dedicated interest of psychologists and other researchers. Roadways are now increasingly recognised as an excellent naturalistic setting to study a variety of behaviours that were previously constrained to laboratories. Streets and roads are ubiquitous, constituting an integral part of most people’s everyday environment or life space. As with other environmental features, emotional meanings are attached to our subjective perceptions of roadways which ultimately influence immediate and long term thoughts, feelings, and actions. This volume describes the growing body of research on driver behaviour and traffic safety, including the nature, measurement and treatment of roadway aggression, types of traffic violations in diverse parts of the world, the pervasive concern with the alcohol and driving, attempts to modify problematic driver behaviours, engineering and human factors concerns such as cell phone operation by drivers, the use of vehicle black box recorders, and the safety of airbags. We also present some examples of theoretical models and their usefulness in stimulating research and providing an overall explanatory model for a diverse range of driving behaviours. The chapters in this book explore many of these issues with driver behaviours being investigated by psychologists, sociologists, engineers and others.