The Effects of ATT and Non-ATT Systems and Treatments on Driver Speed Behaviour

Författare

Samantha Comte
José Santos
Andras Varhelyi

Summary, in English

MASTER (MAnaging Speeds of Traffic on European Roads) aims to provide re-commendations for speed management strategies and policies and develop guidelines for the development of innovative speed management tools. This document reviews the relevant literature and various Advanced Transport Telematics (ATT) and traditional (non-ATT) methods of reducing driver speed are evaluated. It is concluded that traditional methods such as traffic calming can be effective at reducing speed at isolated sites. However their effects are localised in time and space, and have the additional drawbacks of lack of public acceptability, secondary costs such as noise and pollution, and possible accident migration. The most successful measures appear to be those which require drivers physically to lower their speed (e.g road humps) or alter the way in which drivers perceive the road (e.g. perceptual countermeasures). Technologically innovative methods offer opportunities of providing feedback to individual drivers, of implementing variable speed limits to maintain traffic flow and of automating longitudinal control by means of speed limiters and adaptive cruise control. It was concluded that informative systems have much smaller negative safety effects than intervening systems and appear to be more acceptable to drivers. ATT technologies are promising, but the associated issues of reliability, behavioural adaptation and acceptability merit further research. Trials will be carried out on a driving simulator to establish the relative contributions of various ATT and non-ATT speed reduction measures to safety.

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