When a road design solution is quite out of standards for the presence of insurmountable constraints, there is the need for an objective procedure aimed at achieving a certain level of safety for drivers.To avoid issues on judicial responsibility, designers aim to fully satisfy the existing standards, possibly without any exception. Traditional methodologies based on previous experience or road administrators' guidelines generally caused problems due to the high subjectivity involved in the analysis.In this paper, to overpass these issues, a rational procedure based on vehicles telemetry data in a simulated environment is proposed. This process, through synthetic indices, allows the analysts to compare two road geometries, similar but different, because one includes curves with shorter residual circular arcs than threshold values imposed by Italian standards.The main results, derived from a two-way ANOVA with subsequent contrast analysis, suggest that a certain deviation respect to the standards did not determine any decay in the driver's performance.Compared to the existing literature, in this study a full objective procedure was proposed, based on a totally new indicator, which can be easily adapted to any context, involving driver, road and vehicle at the same time.

Functionality of a square used for ferry boats boarding has repercussions on safety and comfort of users, as well as on the efficiency of maritime transport. Inadequate use of the infrastructure causes driving errors followed by corrective manoeuvres, loss of time and potential accidents with consequences for community and the maritime transport compa-ny. The wide diversification of traffic components and payment methods are generally managed through a traditional horizontal and vertical signage system that does not refer to any current legislation. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to investigate driver's behaviour and the interaction that takes place between the latter and the environ-mental context. In particular, the authors focused on the study of the driver’s workload in a simulated environment, considering a users' sample and different driving scenarios inside the boarding area, concerning traffic conditions (isolated vehicle or presence of disturbing vehicles) and signs position. All this, in order to evaluate whether any change in a virtual context could bring real benefits to drivers, before being transferred to the real context. The results obtained, in terms of subjective workload and performance measures, have made it possible to judge the different solutions proposed in a simulated environment through synthetic indices referring to the entire boarding place or at certain parts of it. In this way, the manager can decide to change the circulation of the entire square or only some aspects of detail, such as some signals, in the event that they manifest an evident difficulty in the transfer of infor-mation. The use of the simulated environment allows greater speed in identifying the best solution, lower costs (avoid-ing the creation of a critical configuration for circulation) and greater user safety, since risky manoeuvres are identi-fied and corrected by the simulator. The proposed procedure can be used by managers for a correct arrangement of the signs, for the purpose of correctly directing the flows and maximizing the flow rate disposed of.

The role of road markings is fundamental for traffic safety, as it represents an essential optical driving instrument both for effective drivers and autonomous vehicles. This research aims to evaluate the effects of the decay of road marking visibility along curves, specifically the variability in lateral acceleration. Traditionally, issues related to the correct interpretation of a road alignment were studied by means of trajectory analyses. However, they involved information about the vehicle’s geometrical position without any indication on dynamics. To explore this aspect further, an experiment in a simulated environment involving 21 drivers was performed. They drove along a test road in a standardized scenario considering only three variables: the curve direction (right or left), the deviation angle (70° or 30°), and the road marking visibility percentage (100%, 50%, 10%, and 0%). The results, in differences between theoretical (depending on design speed and curve radius) and effective lateral accelerations, provide further evidence of the strategic role of the markings. However, when markings deteriorate, drivers activate some balancing mechanisms to mitigate the dynamic effects along curves and, in turn, to improve comfort and safety. The proposed procedure is not only of direct practical interest, but it is also fully generalizable to other contexts and issues, involving several other elements that may influence the phenomenon, such as road geometry, visibility conditions, and traffic flow speed.

When a road design solution is quite out of standards for the presence of insurmountable constraints, there is the need for an objective procedure aimed at achieving a certain level of safety for drivers. To avoid issues on judicial responsibility, designers aim to fully satisfy the existing standards, possibly without any exception. Traditional methodologies based on previous experience or road administrators’ guidelines generally caused problems due to the high subjectivity involved in the analysis. In this paper, to overpass these issues, a rational procedure based on vehicles telemetry data in a simulated environment is proposed. This process, through synthetic indices, allows the analysts to compare two road geometries, similar but different, because one includes curves with shorter residual circular arcs than threshold values imposed by Italian standards. The main results, derived from a two-way ANOVA with subsequent contrast analysis, suggest that a certain deviation respect to the standards did not determine any decay in the driver’s performance. Compared to the existing literature, in this study a full objective procedure was proposed, based on a totally new indicator, which can be easily adapted to any context, involving driver, road and vehicle at the same time.