21–22 October 2025
Berlin, Germany
Local hosts: Peter Wagner, Marek Junghans, Ragna Hoffmann
The course is organized in connection to the 37th ICTCT conference.
Teachers
The course faculty consists of senior researchers and university professors with an extensive experience in road safety.
Attila Borsos
University of Gyor
Hungary
Attila Borsos received his master’s degree in Economics from the University of Gyor, Hungary, and in Civil Engineering from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He gained his PhD in Civil Engineering from the University of Gyor, where he is full professor in the Department of Transport Infrastructure and Water Resources Engineering since 2012. He was a Visiting Scholar at Florida Atlantic University in 2013 and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Connecticut in 2010. He is a member of the PIARC World Road Association Technical Committee 3.1 Road Safety. His main research interest is road safety, more specifically accident prediction models, traffic safety trends, surrogate measures of safety, and the effect of Autonomous Vehicles on safe road design.
Stijn Daniels
Transport & Mobility Leuven
KU Leuven
Belgium
His primary research interest is road safety: causes and mechanisms associated with road crashes and near-crash events, effects of road design on crash occurrence, safety issues for vulnerable road users, effectiveness analysis, cost-benefit analysis and economic valuation.
Anja Katharina Huemer
Universität der Bundeswehr München
Germany
Anja Katharina Huemer is a professor for traffic psychology at Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany. She received her PhD on the measurement of driver distraction in 2012 from Technische Universität Braunschweig. Her main research interests are the safety and comfort of vulnerable road users and promoting sustainable mobility by system design.
Carl Johnsson
Lund University
Sweden
Carl Johnsson has his PhD from Lund University, Sweden. His research focuses mainly traffic conflicts (near-accidents) and how they can be used to understand failures in traffic, trajectory data collection using video analysis and driving simulators, as well as understanding and causal interpretation of safety critical behaviors.
Peter Wagner
German Aerospace Center
Berlin, Germany
Peter Wagner is a physicist with DLR, and a honory professor at the Technical University of Berlin. He received his PhD from the University of Kiel. His work is mostly about traffic and transport modelling and simulation, and he was instrumental in starting the open source traffic flow simulator SUMO. His interest in traffic safety focuses on the statistical description but as well on modelling traffic safety.
Ralf Risser
Palacky University in Olomouc
Czech Republic
Ralf Risser is an Austrian traffic psychologist. His main areas of professional interest are psychological aspects of mobility, sustainability and active traffic modes. At this time Visiting professor at Palacky University in Olomouc, Department of Psychology, Ralf Risser is a member of International Cooperation on Theories and Concepts in Traffic Safety (former ICTCT President, now Honorary member) and TPI (Traffic Psychology International).
Programme
21 October 2025
Road safety problems and collection of data
9:00–9:15
‘Introduction: course & faculty & participants’
9:15–10:00
‘Shaping traffic safety policies: a role game’
Anja Katharina Huemer
The purpose of the role game is to provide practical insights into the complexity of the decision-making process within traffic safety domain. The game serves also as an icebreaker to facilitate more informal communication among the course participants and with the teachers.
10:00–10:15
Coffee break
10:15–11:30
‘Safe System approach in traffic safety’
Stijn Daniels
In this session we will introduce the principles of a Safe System approach to road safety. Such an approach looks at safety as an integral part of the wider road traffic system. We will discuss in the group to what extent this approach differs from other approaches and what consequences this could have on current road safety policies.
11:30–12:30
Lunch
12:30–13:45
‘How to measure road traffic safety?’
Attila Borsos
13:45–15:00
‘Surrogate measures of safety and behavioral observation studies’
Carl Johnsson
Quite often, researchers cannot rely on historical accident counts due to their scarcity, poor quality (due to under-reporting or errors in coding) or simply due to absence of any history (in case of newly built sites). In such situations, alternative methods for measuring safety performance are called for. In this lecture we will discuss how traffic conflict and behavioural observations can be used as a complement—or a supplement—for accident data. A significant part of the lecture will be devoted to watching and discussing the actual traffic videos, what safety relevant information could be extracted from them and how it should be interpreted and generalized.
15:00–15:30
Coffee break
15:30–16:45
‘Traffic Safety Research Topics at DLR-TS: Report from the Work-Bench’
Andreas Leich
This talk illuminates some topics in traffic safety, focusing on what our group is doing here at DLR. We are interested in methods to get reliable (big) data, both for crashes as well as for conflicts. We are working with a mix of traditional GLM-based safety performance functions, and AI-based tools that are sometimes less restricted than GLMs, to better understand the causes that lead to crashes.
16:45
End of the day recap
22 October 2025
Road user behavior and traffic safety measures
9:00–9:15
Mid-course recapitulation
9:15–10:30
‘Traffic psychology: a holistic perspective’
Ralf Risser
This lecture is an introduction to the human factors part of the course. We will discuss the role of road users in the traffic system in a holistic way and try to find the answer to the question ‘Why do people act in traffic the way they do?‘. Not least, questions dealing with human behavior, sustainability, and mobility will be tackled.
10:30–10:45
Coffee break
10:45–12:00
‘Motivation and behavior of road users’
Anja Katharina Huemer
In this lecture, we will talk about the fundamentals of behavior in road traffic. Perception, motivation, and activation regulation models will be presented to explain choices, performance, and unsafe behaviors in traffic.
12:00–13:00
Lunch
13:00–14:15
‘Accounting for human factors in road system design’
Attila Borsos
An interactive lecture on the relationship between human factors and road design. The lecture will touch upon various human factors (e.g. workload, perception, recognition), safe system approaches (Swedish Vision Zero, Swiss Cheese model), as well as theories on driving task, task performance and information processing.
14:15–14:30
Coffee break
14:30–15:30
‘Presentation skills for making impact’
Anja Katharina Huemer
Majority of scientific presentations are utterly dull, sending the audience directly to sleep. The results that took months to produce go unnoticed, the important messages never reach to the right people. Sounds wrong, right?
In this talk we will cover the absolute fundamentals of making an engaging presentation. Who is your audience and how your research is relevant for them? What is the key message you want them to remember? How to deliver it so that people want to ask you for more details and read your full paper?
And, no, it is not about PowerPoint fancy functions.
15:30
Closing recapitulation/evaluation
