[Safety measures in traffic; how risk compensation affects our behaviour].

In 2020, more than 600 people died as a result of a traffic crash in the Netherlands and 6,500 were hospitalized after they had sustained a serious injury (MAIS 3+). These numbers are much lower than those in the beginning of the seventies of the last century, when there were more than 3,000 road fatalities. To reduce the number of fatalities, many measures have been taken to avoid road crashes and reduce injury severity.

Speed choice and mental workload of elderly cyclists on e-bikes in simple and complex traffic situations: a field experiment.

To study the speed choice and mental workload of elderly cyclists on electrical assisted bicycles (e-bikes) in simple and complex traffic situations compared to these on conventional bicycles, a field experiment was conducted using two instrumented bicycles. These bicycles were identical except for the electric pedal support system. Two groups were compared: elderly cyclists (65 years of age and older) and a reference group of cyclists in middle adulthood (between 30 and 45 years of age).

Five road safety education programmes for young adolescent pedestrians and cyclists: a multi-programme evaluation in a field setting.

A practical approach was developed to assess and compare the effects of five short road safety education (RSE) programmes for young adolescents that does not rely on injury or crash data but uses self reported behaviour. Questionnaires were administered just before and about one month after participation in the RSE programmes, both to youngsters who had participated in a RSE programme, the intervention group, and to a comparable reference group of youngsters who had not, the reference group. For each RSE programme, the answers to the questionnaires in the pre- and post-test were checked for internal consistency and then condensed into a single safety score using categorical principal components analysis.

Young drivers who obtained their licence after an intensive driving course report more incidents than drivers with a traditional driver education.

This paper studies the effectiveness of intensive driving courses; both in driving test success and safe driving after passing the driving test. The so-called intensive driving course (IDC) consists of a limited number of consecutive days in which the learner driver takes driving lessons all day long; and is different from traditional training in which lessons are spread out over several months and in which learners take one or two driving lessons of approximately 1 h each per week. Our study indicates that--in the first two years of their driving career--IDC drivers (n=35) reported an incident significantly more often (43%) than 351 drivers who obtained their driving licence after traditional training (26%).