Impact of ITS on driver's safety: positive or negative ?
PAUZIE
Type de document
COMMUNICATION AVEC ACTES INTERNATIONAL (ACTI)
Langue
anglais
Auteur
PAUZIE
Résumé / Abstract
Ambitious objectives in Europe have been clearly stated in the EU White Paper (European Commission 2001 on transport) and are dealing with a commitment at the European level to reduce drastically the number of crashes and fatalities on the road, with a perspective of concrete results. An opportunity to support this aim would be in the development and spreading of information and communication technologies, usually labeled 'Intelligent Transport System' (ITS) when applied to the transport domain, covering a set of applications designed and implemented to improve transport in a broader sense, including infrastructure, private and public transport and freight. Several ITS applications have been developed in the automotive area. In terms of road safety, there is a hope in ITS functions to compensate human deficiencies in terms of perception, decision taking, emergency reactions, but there is also a concern dealing with behavior adaptation and risk compensation while using these functions, and potential interference with the main driving task due to attention sharing induced by additional tasks (Matthews & all., 2003; Pauzié & all., 2010). Effective achievement of the expected benefits will depend on conditions of systems design and implementation: in particular, in which extent the system answers to drivers needs, is compatible with their functional capacities whatever their age and satisfies the criteria of relevance, usability and acceptability. This is true for informative systems, requiring additional attention from the driver to be used, where the benefit of this cognitive load has to be put in balance with the potential interference created with the driving task. This is also true in the case of automation technologies, where assistance systems are able to take care of some control tasks traditionally assigned to the driver, and which brings the problem of the tasks dispatching between human and machine, as well as the choice of the logic used for the management of this control sharing, substitute or co-operative (Wilde G.J.S., 1982). In order to process a human-centred design, it is necessary to investigate deeply the drivers' needs and requirements. For example, elderly drivers reported more navigation problems such as way finding with increasing old age and have more difficulties with maneuvers related to gap acceptance for crossing non-limited access highways, and high-speed lane changes on limited-access highways. So, this population could benefit of an easy access to clear instructions from a system, but difficulties in attention sharing between several informative sources have to be taken into consideration. The novice drivers have difficulties in self-calibration, hazard and risk perception. An adequate design of functions supporting the novice driver can induce potential positive consequences in terms of road safety, and the issue raises is the setting up of training program for these innovative functions. Some ITS functions are more devoted to entertaining the driver, such as mobile phone use, or can be developed in the context of professional use, such as connecting electronic mail. Due to the fact that they are irrelevant for the driving task itself, experimental investigations showed that these types of functions are prone to have negative impact on the road safety, as requiring additional attention demand in comparison with a reference-driving situation, where no system would be available. To summarize, driving task is a complex activity and ITS functions have to match with the driver's expectations, needs, requirements and capacities, if potential positive impact on road safety wants to be achieved. This is really a challenge when realizing that there is a wide heterogeneity of drivers, meaning that the same product has to fit with an important range of contexts and users. The question of designers' responsibility concerning these systems is also an important aspect to consider. The negative or positive impact of ITS implementation on road safety is still a crucial issue to be investigated, renewed in terms of research as technology evolved and as there is an increase widespread use among drivers population.
