The National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), in cooperation with the Hellenic Institute of Transportation Engineers (HITE) organises the 8th Road Safety & Simulation International Conference 2022 (RSS2022) which will be held on NEW DATES 08-10 June 2022 in Athens, Greece. The Conference’s theme this year will be: “Road Safety and Digitalisation” aiming to capture all recent trends in road safety emerging technologies, surrogate measures, augmented and virtual reality, big data, modeling and simulation, which are expected to boost global road safety in the coming years. Road safety experts and scientists from all over the world will join forces for a widely open and vivid discussion on both traditional and innovative solutions with high potential for traffic safety improvement. Selected papers will be published in key international scientific journals and special awards will be granted to best papers.  

According to the EU road fatalities infographic of the NTUA Road Safety Observatory based on preliminary European Commission DG-Move data for 2020, Sweden ranked first in 2020 with 18 fatalities/mil. inhabitants followed by Malta (21) and Denmark (27), whereas Greece ranked 20th (54) and Romania ranked last (85). 13 countries had a better performance than the EU average of 42 fatalities/mil. inhabitants. Greece was the only country that achieved the decade 2010-2020 target of 50% road fatalities reduction, with a performance of -52%. 

A paper titled “Which factors lead to driving errors? A structural equation model analysis through a driving simulator experiment” authored by Panagiotis Papantoniou, George Yannis and Eleni Christofa is  published in Journal of IATSS. Data were obtained from a driving simulation experiment in which 95 participants covering all ages were asked to drive under different types of distraction (no distraction, conversation with passenger, cell phone use) in rural and urban road environment, as well as in both low and high traffic conditions. Structural Equation Models were developed and the driving error was modeled as a latent variable based on several individual driving simulator parameters. The results of this complex model reveal that the impact of driver characteristics and area type are the only statistically significant factors affecting the probability of driving errors. Interestingly, neither conversing with a passenger nor talking on the cell phone have a statistically significant impact on driving error behaviour which highlights the importance of the present analysis and more specifically the development of a measure that represents overall driving error behaviour instead of individual driving errors variables.

A paper titled “Are driving errors and driving performance correlated? A dual structural equation model” authored by Panagiotis Papantoniou, George Yannis and Eleni Vlachogianni is now published in Advances in Transportation Studies. The objective of this paper is to investigate several factors (including driver distraction, driver characteristics and road environment) that affect overall driving error behaviour and estimates a new unobserved variable which underlines driving errors. This estimation is performed with data obtained from a driving simulation experiment in which 95 participants covering all ages were asked to drive under different types of distraction (no distraction, conversation with passenger, cell phone use) in rural and urban road environment, as well as in both low and high traffic conditions.