Background: Recent technological advancements in automated vehicles are becoming more popular, especially in developed and emerging markets. These changes are bringing new challenges for the drivers, planners, engineers, and manufacturers. Due to several crash incidents that occurred over the past years involving driverless vehicles, safety concerns of potential users have been raised. One key aspect is to design the system so that the user experience can be improved, especially in terms of safety and reliability. User's viewpoint can also be used to collect feedback about the system based on their experience and interaction with the technology. Public opinion surveys have been frequently used to capture such feedback. In this context, this recently completed survey study investigates the opinion, trust, and expectations of potential users in Belgium, particularly on driverless vehicles' safety performance. Methods: Various safety critical driving scenarios were designed to obtain a more detailed understanding of the public's safety perceptions. Participants were asked to provide their assessment on automated driving systems' safety performance under those scenarios in a stated preference survey. Results: Total 360 people participated in the survey. Those who provided demographic information included 64.1% male and 34.8% female, out of which almost 70% had bachelor’s level education or above. Several demographics such as age, education level, income level, owning a car, driving experience, frequency of driving, and previous experience with automated functions, were found to have a significant association with the public's interest and trust in the safety performance of the system. Overall, most of the respondents were optimistic regarding the system's reliability for making efficient and safe decisions (e.g., avoiding a potential collision) under various critical traffic scenarios. Driving on motorways was the most trusted scenario (90% agreement) for automated vehicle operation. Situations where respondents indicated concern or lesser trust in the technology included the presence of a large number of vulnerable road users (41%), driving in poor visibility due to weather conditions (41.6%), and driving through work zones (46%). Conclusions: The results offer unique challenges to designers, technology developers, planners, and manufacturers about developing such systems and strategies that would lead to the safe and successful adaptation of future automated vehicles. The willingness to pay for getting an automated vehicle was also correlated with trust in the system's safety performance. The study's findings suggest further exploration of users' understanding, trust, and safety expectations of the driverless vehicle technology for successful deployment and adaptation.@en

“Everything somewhere” or “something everywhere” is the classic dilemma concerning the development and implementation of the future generation of vehicles, i.e., automated vehicles (AVs). Both strategies include diverse policy options that could significantly impact road networks’ planning, design, operation, and utilization. Until now, no significant research has been conducted concerning their implications. In this paper, we aim to examine how ready the current physical infrastructure is by identifying the requirements of each strategy and then applying them in a com-mon type of intersection. The study’s findings demonstrate that AVs’ performance can be affected by policy implementation decisions and adds further weight to the argument of AVs separation or no-separation from no-AVs traffic. Furthermore, the insignificant improvements in traffic performance imply the low readiness of the current road networks in urban areas to accommodate the new technology. This study contributes to determining that research on the readiness of the road infrastructure and the deployment of AVs in urban areas is inevitable. It also identifies that roads’ geometric design can dramatically affect AVs’ operation and the difficulties of implementing dedi-cated lanes in urban areas due to space availability.

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Automated vehicles (AVs) promise to improve road safety, reduce traffic congestion and emissions, and enhance mobility. However, evidence regarding their safety benefits has not been systematically investigated and documented. In this study, we utilise a scoping review approach to investigate and synthesise the existing literature on higher levels of AVs’ safety implications. This aids future relevant studies by identifying the research gaps and reporting the methodological approaches used. The review focused not only on peer-reviewed articles but also on grey literature to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research state. In total, 5724 articles were identified, and 4167 records were screened after duplicates and dual publications removal, from which 27 were found eligible for review. Ultimately, 24 studies met all the inclusion criteria and were considered for the review. The reported evidence was focused on changes in road safety levels after the deployment of AVs in transport networks. The data was extracted and charted by one reviewer using tables to create a descriptive summary of the results and address the scoping review's questions and objectives. In general, the findings suggest that AVs hold the potential to improve the overall safety on roads, although the existing evidence is not mainly based on real data but assumptions regarding vehicles’ capabilities and behaviour. The limited number of studies and the fact that all of them were published or conducted after 2014 indicate that the research on AVs’ safety impacts is just emerging.

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Professionals from various disciplines have been investing huge efforts in the last few decades in the development and deployment of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs). It is believed that CAVs can mitigate the main drawbacks of transport issues such as safety, emissions, and congestion. The main objective of this paper is to examine how intersection control types will affect the operation of automated vehicles (AVs) in urban areas. Since AVs implementation is still in its first steps and empirical data is not yet available, the microscopic traffic flow simulation software PTV Vissim was utilized. Different case studies based on commonly occurring intersection types were investigated in PTV Vissim under various AVs penetration rates. The results show that the introduction of AVs had a greater effect in the performance of uncontrolled intersections. Further research is required on the impact of AVs on safety and their interactions with vulnerable road users.

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Automated vehicles (AVs) are expected to assist in decreasing road traffic fatalities, particularly among passenger cars. However, until now limited research has been conducted on how they will impact the safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs) (i.e., cyclists and pedestrians). Therefore, there is a clear need to start taking into account the interactions between AVs and VRUs as an integrated element of the transport network, especially in urban areas where they are dominant. The objective of this study is to verify whether the anticipated implementation of AVs can actually improve cyclists’ safety. For this purpose, the microscopic traffic flow simulation software PTV Vissim combined with the surrogate safety assessment model (SSAM) were utilized. The road network used for this analysis was generated based on a real study case in a medium-sized city in Belgium, where narrow streets in the city center are shared on many occasions between vehicles and cyclists. The findings of the analysis show a notable reduction in the total number of conflicts between cars, but also between cars and cyclists, compared to the current situation, assuming a 100% market penetration scenario for AVs. Moreover, the severity level of conflicts also decreased as a result of the lack of human-driven vehicles in the traffic streams. @en