Traffic Safety, Road User Attitudes and Sustainable Transportation

Dear Colleagues,

Car crash-free driving is the optimal target, the vision that drives scientists, entrepreneurs, and stakeholders to achieve the fixed component of a sustainable strategy. Nowadays, an increased number of driving assistance systems offer drivers and passengers a high level of safety and comfort to protect vehicle occupants and other road users.

An important goal on the road to fatal incident-free driving for stakeholders and behavioural scientists is the sustainable implication of good practices and measures that increase public awareness of the importance of traffic safety, for example, through education programs and roadshows,, and provide information on safety technology and innovations. Certainly, to achieve a sustainable improvement in this sector, millions of citizens need to change their attitudes (e.g., a shift from individual car use to more sustainable traffic modes, such as walking or cycling, safe driving, etc.). This will not be possible without cooperation from citizens. As many of them as possible need to modify their own attitudes and preferences. To achieve this goal, their is necessary to use targeted psychological measures to motivate citizens to change. 

It is well known that both the stakeholders and the behavioural scientists know that the individual dependency on motor vehicles has a straightforward basis: if it is easier, faster, and more economic for an individual to travel by car/motorcycle, he or she will do it. Research has shown that it is a principle of microeconomics, which is the elasticity of the demand regarding the costs. Why would people walk, cycle, and take public transport if these are more difficult, time-consuming, and expensive than going by car? It is even worse when the city does not have a proper and safe infrastructure for these alternative modes of transportation.

Hence, sustainability in changing citizens’ attitudes and preferences should take into consideration fulfilling the needs of mobility without jeopardizing future generations with regard to natural resources and pollution levels. In this way, citizens’ motivation and education should concentrate on understanding that the emphasis should be given to the movement of people rather than the movement of individual motor vehicles, focusing on safe driving (e.g., exposure to  hazard reduction by  adopting  traffic  calming  measures,  physically  separating  traffic modes, physically separating traffic from other activities, defensive driving, following the road safety legislation, etc.), non-motorized transport, and on overcoming the problems related to urban and transportation planning due to the individual dependency on motor vehicles. 

It is important to reconsider ways to overcome the habits of perceiving and using individual motor vehicles given that society is organized around this mode of transport. Sustainable interventions and integrated strategies to change the way people perceive their daily choices to move, in addition to those for providing safe driving (e.g., human behaviour, low speed, traffic code compliance, etc.) in a safe infrastructure (e.g., sidewalks, pedestrian crossings, safer roads) require marketing to raise the awareness of the population regarding the external costs that the individual dependency on motor vehicles brings to society. 

In this Special Issue, original research articles and reviews are welcome. Research areas may include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Car crash-free driving and sustainable safety interventions, education programs, and good practices;
• Safety technology and innovations and sustainable traffic modes and infrastructures;
• Attitudes and behaviours toward public awareness on traffic safety and sustainable road safety and traffic modes;
• Interventions, attitudes, and behaviours toward public preferences with regard to their daily choices to move and their dependency on motor vehicles.

We look forward to receiving your contributions.

Prof. Dr. Joannes Chliaoutakis
Dr. Maria Papadakaki
Guest Editors

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• car crash-free driving
• driving attitudes and preferences
• sustainable good practices and measures
• traffic safety education
• transportation safe infrastructure
• sustainable modes of transportation