Today, we went down to SWOV in the Hague. Founded in 1962 as a private institute, SWOV is the national institute for scientific road safety research in the Netherlands. They are internationally known for their scientific research into the areas of road safety.

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SWOV Headquarters. A “holy place”for transport safety engineers.

There at SWOV, we were lectured by two women, regarding the psychology behind road safety. I found both lectures to be informative, it was good to view traffic safety from a psychological perspective. Some takeaways from the lectures:

  • The three E’s of traffic safety: Engineering, Education, Enforcement
  • “Don’t bend the person, but bend the tool” (so like when people make errors, the system should take care of the error)
  • Safe speed for roads with possible conflicts between cars and unprotected road users is 30 km/hr
  • It is important to take into consideration a human’s capacity:                 – limited memory, limited simultaneous actions, selective attention, forecasting and  anticipation, not innate.
  • 100,000 kms of driving/biking required to have sufficient practice
  • Practice helps to build automated routines
  • When designing changes to a traffic system, it is important to avoid overlap, make no unnecessary variations, and design for high predictability. Also, deviations from what the traffic user is expecting should be avoided.

All in all, two interesting lectures. I also appreciated how the one lecturer used some psychological games and interacted with us, such as the random number pattern memorization game in order to test how good our memories were.

Then, we were shown the bikes which SWOV uses to monitor and record data. They had 2 electric bikes and 3 “normal bikes”. Each of which were fitted out with a bunch of sensors and cameras, with the main purpose being of collecting data regarding the safety of bike routes.

We had a traditional Dutch lunch with open faced sandwiches, and nutella and stroopwafels for desert.

That afternoon, we were given time to work on our assignment 3. My group (John, Halina, and I), were assigned to the Scheveningen area on the North Sea. You can read all about our assignment on Halina’s blog:

http://sustainandurbanize.blogspot.nl/2016/06/scheveningen-case-study-creating.html