Urban Transport Safety and Resilience Training

Transport systems consist of three main elements:

• roads and infrastructure,
• Vehicles, and
• Road users

Human errors have been proven to be a main factor in most road accidents. Furthermore, semi-automated mobility, as well as new modes such as electric micro-mobility devices, have added extra layers of complexity in relation to understanding road user behaviour.

This course offers a comprehensive insight into traffic psychology and human factors in road safety. It’s designed to impart a multidisciplinary perspective, covering a wide range of aspects including economic, epidemiological, cognitive science, social psychology, and philosophical theories, as well as mathematical modelling. The content is curated to make the extensive scientific literature on road safety accessible to all, irrespective of their educational background.

Participants will gain valuable insights into:

• Interpreting road safety studies,
• Understand the latest scientific developments,
• Familiarise themselves with essential research tools

The course is particularly beneficial for professionals in urban planning, policy making, and traffic safety, equipping them with the skills to methodically address road safety issues and evaluate research proposals for their methodological rigour and novelty. By the end of this course, you will be well-positioned to contribute effectively to road safety initiatives and partnerships with academic institutions.

Individuals of any organisation that deal with the safety of users in transport systems (including drivers, pedestrians and micro-mobility users) can significantly benefit from the knowledge, scientific evidence-based vision and skills gained from this short course. No prior educational background is required.

• Urban and Regional Planners
• Traffic Safety Managers
• Transport Policy Makers
• Roadway Engineers
• Public Health Officials
• Mobility Consultants
• Law Enforcement Officers involved in Traffic Management

• Understand the state-of-the-art knowledge in traffic psychology and road safety
• Develop the capability of assessing research proposals and projects
• Effective and evidence-based policy making
• Understanding the typical methodologies that are used to understand road user behaviour

• Global epidemiology of road accidents and statistics
• Cost of road trauma and the Statistical Value of Life estimation
• Recreational substances and their impact on driver behaviour
• Driver distraction and inattention (phones, residual distraction, workload, fatigue)
• Social psychology of road safety (driver anger, driver style, scales and inventories)
• Neuroscience of driver behaviour (brain activity, eye tracking, physiological indicators)
• The relationship between mental health and the risk of road accidents
• The relationship between personality traits and the risk of road accidents
• Applications of fMRI, EEG, MEG and fNIRS in driver behaviour research
• Pedestrian and cycling safety (vulnerable road users)
• Moral and philosophical aspects of road safety
• Applications of the Theory of Planned Behaviour, road safety culture
• Application of statistical modelling in road safety

The safety of people in crowds is an integral part of public safety. This has two main dimensions. (I) Past records have shown repeatedly that a lack of understanding of crowd behaviour and poor management can result in catastrophes, deaths and injuries in mass gatherings even in the absence of an external risk to safety (e.g., fire or terror attack). (II) The absence of emergency planning in crowded spaces has been shown to be associated with increased vulnerability and risk of deaths when there is an external source of danger. Both these issues—i.e., crowd management under normal operations as well as planning for emergency crowd management—fall under the umbrella of crowd safety science. This entails an understanding of crowd behaviour and human factors, metrics that are typically used to describe the state of the crowd and various crowd phenomena, as well as the ability to predict crowd behaviour and react to different circumstances. Crowd safety is a relatively new science developed predominantly over the last two decades. It is a cross-section between transportation, psychology, computer science and applied physics. This course is designed to familiarise you with the fundamentals of this interdisciplinary science and the tools and methods that have been developed and are in use in practice to enhance the safety and comfort/satisfaction level of crowds. It provides the understanding and knowledge required to prevent crowd disasters and catastrophes as well as in-depth insights into planning for cases of emergencies. The course makes the scholarly science of crowd safety accessible to an audience with no prior background.

Individuals of any organisation or entity—public or private—that deal with pedestrian movement, public safety, event safety and emergency management can significantly benefit from the knowledge, scientific evidence-based vision and skills gained from this short course. No prior educational background is required.

• Developing an understanding of human behaviour in a crowd under both normal operations as well as emergency situations
• Developing a knowledge of basic terminologies, metrics, phenomena, modelling and monitoring methodologies in crowd dynamics
• Developing the understanding of how crowd motion can be described and how potentially risky situations can be avoided during the design and operation of mass gatherings
• Developing an understanding of the way through which we can mitigate the risk to crowds and increase the survival rate during emergency scenarios created by external stimuli.

• Introductory concepts of traffic flow theory, including the notion of collective motion and pedestrian traffic, as well as flow, density and their relationship (i.e., the notion of “fundamental diagram”)
• Underlying mechanisms of crowd disasters and crowd accidents (i.e., the notion of crowd turbulence, crowd fluidity, crowd quakes, critical density, stop-and-go phenomenon and shockwaves)
• Epidemiology, ubiquity and history of crowd disasters worldwide
• Diagnostic analysis and revisiting of some of the major previous crowd disasters
• Avenues of crowd density estimation
• Self-organisation phenomena in crowd dynamics
• Unidirectional and bidirectional crowd flow, single-file movement, collision avoidance behaviour and (spontaneous) lane formation
• Common myths and misconceptions in crowd dynamics
• Controversial topics: crowd panic, irrationality, herding behaviour, crowd stampede
• Social psychological aspects of crowd behaviour
• Crowd behaviour in emergency evacuations
• Strategic, tactical and operational decision-making of people within a crowd (i.e., reaction time, exit choice, exit choice adaptation, local navigation and step taking, bottleneck behaviour, social groups within crowds)
• Crowd motion modelling methodologies (i.e., social force, cellular automata, fluid mechanics models, etc.)
• Decision-making modelling of people within a crowd
• Experimental methods in crowd dynamics
• Field methods in crowd dynamics
• Crowd simulation modelling, and the notion of model calibration and validity
• Crowd and evacuation optimisation: mathematical, architectural and behavioural methods
• The role of individual awareness and preparedness, and public education in prevention of crowd disasters and risk mitigation in emergency scenarios (including the role of correcting common beliefs, myths and misconceptions amongst the public)