Dear Colleagues,

Although 2020 marked the end of the first UN Decade of Action for Road Safety, the goal of reducing global road deaths by 50% was not fully met. Road accidents are still responsible for 1.3 million annual deaths and almost 50 million injuries all over the world. The new UN global plan, thus, is to halve road deaths and injuries by 2030. In accordance with this goal, many countries have defined national traffic safety programs that share the common vision to transform the road traffic system into such one excluding all known possibilities for human error and minimizing the consequences of traffic accidents, which can still happen.

The new EU road traffic safety policy framework is based on the Safe System Approach, which highlights a shared responsibility for all road users. The starting point is that the system should be “forgiving”, and traffic accidents should not result in death or serious injuries or be the inevitable price that people have to pay in order to meet the ever-increasing demand for mobility. The energy of a moving vehicle is proportional to the square of its speed, and in the case of a well-designed “forgiving roadside”, this energy will be dissipated during a collision, and less energy will be transferred to passengers, which should result in fewer injuries. The road and the immediate road environment should be designed and built in such a way that free flow speed is safe in the event of an accident. According to this, road managers and designers have a significant responsibility to provide a road system that protects all road users, which can be achieved through appropriate designs of road infrastructure.

Additionally, various studies indicate that the time for the introduction of autonomous vehicles into the existing traffic network is in the near future, which also opens up a number of issues of adaptation or complete reconstruction of the existing traffic infrastructure, which is currently completely subordinated to classic vehicles. This area represents a great challenge for road infrastructure designers and should certainly not be neglected.

This Special Issue focuses on “Road Safety and Road Infrastructure Design”, and researchers and professionals are invited to submit original research articles on the following areas:

• Road safety interventions and traffic calming measures;
• Human factors and driving behavior;
• Driving simulator studies;
• Safety solutions for urban and rural areas;
• Vulnerable users (VRUs) and micro-mobility;
• Safety of VRUs and micro-mobility users;
• Smart infrastructures and solutions for safety of vulnerable users;
• Intelligent technologies for road safety;
• Surrogate safety measures for vulnerable road users;
• Microsimulation applied to road safety;
• Geometric design parameter optimization for autonomous vehicles.

Dr. Sanja Šurdonja
Prof. Dr. Marko Rencelj
Dr. Chiara Gruden
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• road design
• road infrastructure
• road safety
• mobility
• driving simulator
• safety solutions
• road safety measures
• microsimulation
• autonomous vehicles