Same, Same but Different: On the Design of Cross-Regional Advisory Traffic Information Systems

Doctoral thesis, 2017

As the automotive markets increase rapidly in developing countries, the study of cross-regional differences is certainly becoming an important consideration for in-vehicle technology design. Particularly, when moving from immediate/operational responses to warnings towards tactical responses to advisory information, culture in the form of traffic safety culture (TSC) comes into play in relation to both the information needs and drive behaviours. This thesis explores cross-regional design of Advisory Traffic Information Systems (ATIS) – systems which provide feedforward information to support drivers’ situation awareness and decision making during manoeuvres. To gain knowledge of cross-regional design of ATIS, nine studies were carried out to study the regional differences between China and Sweden, looking into information requirements (via user studies) and drivers’ response behavior when utilizing ATIS (via driving simulator studies). The research followed a human centered design process that involved drivers at the center of the process to understand their requirements, identify design ideas and evaluate the drivers’ performance when using an adapted ATIS. In addition, naturalistic driving videos were adopted throughout the whole design process to address the contextual constraints. Regional differences were found to significantly affect drivers’ information requirements and behaviour patterns when using ATIS in driving simulations. Despite sharing the common information requirements in simple traffic situations, the cross-regional differences were significant in complex traffic scenarios with multiple road users. Furthermore, providing an ATIS adapted to the two TSCs, helped in improving drive performance, but did not change or shape the drivers’ original behavior rooted in their own TSCs. To summarize: when the level of traffic complexity and information presentation timing increases, the diversity of drivers’ information requirements and response patterns increases as well. Moreover, drivers from different TSCs might still “game” the system. This implies that ATIS designers need to study and understand drivers’ motives of these utilizations, in order to refine the ATIS further and anticipate the alternative (mis)uses in respect to a given TSC.