Road safety review update by using innovative technologies to investigate driver behaviour

Urban arterial roads provide high-speed passage to facilitate traffic in urban areas. However, unlike freeways, they consist of ramps, roundabouts and unique characteristics due to the limited space in the urban (or semi-urban) environment. The existing studies use the Road Safety Review (RSR) to evaluate geometry, identifying high accident concentration sections and to classify the network based on the expert judgment. Therefore the classical methodology does not consider the interaction between driver and infrastructure. The present study aims to investigate the road safety of an urban arterial motorway, integrating traditional checklist with innovative solutions applied in an experimental site test with participants. The driver visual behaviour has been recorded by head-mounted eye tracker that is used to find the gaze behaviour on different elements. The vehicle used for the test was equipped with the satellite positioning system (GPS), inertial measurement unit (IMU), vehicle CAN data reader (OBD2) and video recorder to monitor the driver behaviour and vehicle trajectory during the track. The results showed that the use of innovative techniques could improve the RSR, by identifying new hazardous points based on the driver behavior.