Assisting the older driver - SWOV

Assisting the older driver
Unsafe decisions can either lead to crashes or to near‐misses. Table 6.7 shows
the number of crashes that actually occurred while participants were driving
the simulator car, classified according to the layout of the intersection at
which the crashes occurred. Note that there were twice as much functionally
middle‐aged drivers as there were functionally young or functionally old
drivers. Most of the crashes occurred at regular 4‐way intersections. A closer
inspection of the specific intersections at which these crashes occurred,
revealed that six out of seven of those crashes occurred at intersections that
were controlled by traffic‐lights. Some occurred because a participant turned
left on green and collided against an approaching vehicle that also had a
green light, others occurred because one of the drivers had passed a red light.
L3‐way R3‐way Roundabout T‐junction 4‐way dual
carriageway
4‐way
regular
Crashes
Young 0 1 1 0 0 2
Middle‐aged 1 0 1 0 0 4
Old 0 0 1 0 0 1
Route
errors
Young 1 0 0 1 0 0
Middle‐aged 3 0 0 0 1 0
Old 4 0 2 0 2 1
Table 6.7. Number of crashes and route errors per functional age group and type of intersection.
Another type of error that seemed to coincide with the complexity of the
intersections, was route error. A total of 15 route errors occurred, 2 made by
functionally young drivers, 4 by functionally middle‐aged, and 9 by
functionally older drivers (Table 6.7). Two intersections were responsible for
half of these route errors. One of those intersections was actually designed to
provoke route errors. It was a three‐way intersection at which participants
were not allowed to continue on the street they were driving on. They had to
turn left, but this was not announced by the route‐information. A sign
indicating that it was not allowed to enter the street in front of them was the
only clue that was available for participants to decide how to proceed (see
Figure 6.7, upper picture). Four drivers missed this clue and drove straight on
instead of turning left. The other traffic situation that misled four drivers,
consisted of a major road having two intersections at only 50 m apart from
each other (see Figure 6.7, lower picture). Participants had to turn left at the
first one. However, some participants thought that the street at the left had
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