Tag: road safety
Digital signage is a distracted driving hazard
Even without smartphones, screaming kids, backseat drivers and in-vehicle displays, driving can be dangerous. The open road may pose one of the biggest — and, incidentally, legal — distractions of all. LED billboards, as a recent study, “A field study on the effects of digital billboards on glance behavior during highway driving,” suggests, may pose […]
Recent study finds reasons to walk to school, and why certain kids aren’t
Everyone has that one relative who can’t wait to regale them with stories of “When I was your age, I trudged to school in the middle of a snowstorm…” These days, kids are walking to school less and less. The results have greater implications than just a lack of stories to tell their future grandkids […]
7 tips for effective road safety campaigns
Is there a science behind an effective traffic safety campaign? Not necessarily, but science does have something to say about why campaigns succeed or fail. A new study, “Persuasive appeals in road safety communication campaigns: Theoretical frameworks and practical implications from the analysis of a decade of road safety campaign materials,” offers significant guidance for how […]
How to make teenage drivers safer
Teens are disproportionately at risk just getting behind the wheel: In the U.S., teenagers age 16 to 19 have three times the rate of fatal crashes as adult drivers. But what if there was a simple way to increase teens’ safety? There is: Recent research has shown that these kids are largely driving cars without adequate crash […]
Black pedestrians must wait 32% longer than whites at U.S. crosswalks
Black pedestrians may be experiencing discrimination at crosswalks, according to a new study. “Racial bias in driver yielding behavior at crosswalks” by researchers Tara Goddard, Kimberly Barsamian Kahn and Arlie Adkins found that black participants were twice as likely as white participants to be passed by two-plus cars. Additionally, the found that black participants experienced a […]
Self-braking cars reduce rear-end accidents by 38%
Self-driving cars, long hailed for their safety benefits, are on the horizon consider the Cadillac, for one). But one new study claims that just a single driver-free feature could reduce accidents by a staggering 38%. Recent research from the European road safety research organization Euro NCAP concludes that self-braking cars (which automatically hit the brakes to […]
How traffic signals work
There’s an intersection you’ve never really noticed because its light always seems to be green when you blow through it, and there’s another that seems to have the longest red light in the world. Both experiences reflect intentional differences in the ways traffic signals work, and while it can seem like cars trump pedestrians and […]