Abstract Manager

Human factors are fundamental to transportation safety, influencing how road users perceive, interpret, and respond to the roadway environment. While advancements in geometric design, traffic control, and data-driven safety analysis have reduced risk, many collisions continue to arise from misalignments between roadway design and real-world human capabilities and limitations. Contemporary Safe System and Vision Zero philosophies highlight this challenge by emphasizing the need to design transportation networks that anticipate human behaviour, support safe choices, and minimize the consequences of inevitable error.

Traditional traffic engineering approaches often prioritize regulatory compliance and geometric standards, sometimes overlooking critical behavioural elements such as perception, cognitive workload, and decision making. This presentation demonstrates how explicitly integrating Human Factors principles with Traffic and Transportation Engineering produces more effective and resilient safety outcomes, particularly for vulnerable and emerging road user groups.

Drawing on over two decades of combined industry experience across transportation planning, geometric design, traffic engineering, road safety, and human factors assessments, our team will present practice-based insights and case studies, both forensic and non‑forensic, that illustrate how behavioural insights, combined with engineering analysis, can uncover latent roadway risks, inform safer intersection and corridor design, and support the implementation of cost effective countermeasures.

The session emphasizes the role of road users within a Safe System, highlighting strategies that address contributing human factors such as distraction and fatigue. It also explores the principle of shared and proportionate responsibility and considers the needs and vulnerabilities of diverse road user groups, including those using emerging micromobility modes. Attendees will gain practical, experience‑based insights into designing and building roads that better account for human strengths and limitations and encourage safer interaction across the transportation system.