24–25 October 2023
Catania, Italy
Local organiser(s): Salvatore Damiano Cafiso, Giuseppina Pappalardo
The course is organized in connection to the 35th ICTCT conference.
Faculty
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, Hungary, where he is an associate professor in the Department of Transport Infrastructure and Water Resources Engineering since 2012 and vice dean for research in the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Transport Sciences since 2015. He was a Visiting Scholar at Florida Atlantic University in 2013 and a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Connecticut in 2010. He was a member of the PIARC World Road Association Technical Committee 3.2 ‘Design and Operation of Safer Road Infrastructure’ from 2012 to 2015. 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
Stijn Daniels, the president of ICTCT, is a researcher and consultant in transport planning, road safety and mobility at Transport & Mobility Leuven (TML), Belgium. He is also a part-time professor in Traffic and Transport Safety at KU Leuven, faculty of Engineering.
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.
Wafa Elias
Shamoon College of Engineering
Israel
Wafa Elias works in the fields of travel behavior and road safety, with particular expertise in factors that impact travel behavior and road safety among the Israeli Arab minority.
Wafa Elias has developed a theoretical framework that connects daily activity patterns and driving behavior, and the risk of being involved in road crashes. To better understand these complex relationships, Wafa focuses on disaggregate studies of individual characteristics, attitudes, activity and travel behavior, residential location, the build environment, social interaction, and the impact of these on road safety.
Anja 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.
Aliaksei Laureshyn
Lund University
Sweden
Aliaksei Laureshyn is Reader in traffic safety and a senior lecturer at Lund University, Sweden. His primary research interests deal with theory and practical use of pro-active methods in road safety analysis. He is an active member in several international committees and working groups related to the subject of Surrogate Measures of Safety (SMoS). Other research interests include emerging technologies for data collection in traffic, policy and practice in road safety work, particularly in the view of Vision Zero/Safe System paradigm.
Salvatore Damiano Cafiso
University of Catania
Italy
Salvatore Damiano Cafiso is full professor of ‘Road, Railways and Airport’ at the Department of Civil Engineering and Architecture of University of Catania. He has been involved in teaching and research in the field of transportation engineering since 1987. His expertise includes highway geometric design, traffic safety, pavement engineering and road asset management. Road safety research in these years involved highways design and maintenance while addressing the needs and behavior of different users (heavy vehicles, passenger cars, motorcycles, bicycles and e-scooters) and recently also Connected and Automated vehicles in a mix traffic environment. He has been successful in securing several research funds in these areas from national and international agencies. He is handling editor of Transportation Research Record and member of the editorial board of international journals, member of committees at TRB and PIARC. The research dissemination includes 95 papers in international journals with more than 1300 citations in Scopus.
Matúš Šucha
Palacky University in Olomouc
Czech Republic
Matúš Šucha is a Czech traffic psychologist. His main areas of professional interest are psychological aspects of mobility, sustainability and active traffic modes. Associate Professor Šucha is an active member of numerous prestigious international organisations, including ICTCT—International Cooperation on Theories and Concepts in Traffic Safety, TPI—Traffic Psychology International or DGVP—Deutsche Gesellschaft für Verkehrspsychologie.
Programme
24 October 2023, 9:00–17:00
Road safety problems and collection of data
‘Shaping traffic safety policies: a role game’
Anja Huemer
Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany
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.
‘Safe System in traffic safety’
Stijn Daniels
Transport & Mobility Leuven | KU Leuven, Belgium
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.
‘How to measure Road Traffic Safety?’
Attila Borsos
University of Gyor, Hungary
’Surrogate measures of safety and behavioral observation studies’
Aliaksei Laureshyn
Lund University, Sweden
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.
’New technologies to improve traffic safety ’
Salvatore Damiano Cafiso
University of Catania, Italy
This lesson will present the expected impact of new technologies on road safety including both connected-automated vehicles and smart roads. Technology development and future trend will be presented, but the problem analysis will be from the point of view of the road design and maintenance.
New technologies in automated vehicles are also providing new sources of data that were before limited to expensive naturalistic studies. A practical part of the lecture will be devoted to present, with real case studies, example of data collection, dataset preparation and modeling for safety studies.
25 October 2023, 9:00–17:00
Traffic safety measures and policies
‘Traffic Psychology: a holistic perspective’
Matúš Šucha
Palacky University in Olomouc, Czech Republic
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.
‘Motivation and behavior of road users’
Anja Huemer
Universität der Bundeswehr München, Germany
In this lecture, Anja 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.
‘Accounting for human factors in road system design’
Attila Borsos
University of Gyor, Hungary
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.
‘Presentation skills to make an impact’
Aliaksei Laureshyn
Lund University, Sweden
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.
