Transport Safety
Striving to improve safety of transport users through research expertise in human factors, engineering, psychology, medicine and health sciences, education and social science.
As a University Centre of Excellence, the Transport Safety Research Centre (TSRC) is recognised for its research quality and impact.
A key focus of the TSRC’s research involves understanding real-world aspects of the transport-users and how this understanding impacts on transport safety and smart/intelligent mobility.
The Centre currently brings together around 20 academic and research staff plus around 10 PhD students, most of whom are conducting applied research across a wide range of transport safety areas including evidence-based policy-making tools, accident causation research, safer infrastructures, advanced vehicle and road-based safety systems, driver fatigue and the impact of road user behaviour on safety and mobility. We have extensive expertise and experience in experimental research methodology and analysis of safety and injury data. Several members of the Centre have been involved in transport safety research since the 1980’s.
Transport Safety experts from the School are key to developing research and innovation in Safe and Smart Mobility as part of the Loughborough University led Smart Mobility Living Lab.
Key projects
The group has substantial experience in national and EC projects. Previous major projects it has successfully coordinated or have participated in include the EC-funded projects SafetyCube (H2020), SaferAfrica (H2020), UDRIVE (H2020), DaCoTA (FP 7), TeleFOT (FP7), SafetyNet (FP 6) and PENDANT (FP 5). Team members have collectively published over 500 research papers in relations to traffic safety policy, driver behaviour, driver fatigue, crash analysis, crash simulation, injury causation/prevention and injury biomechanics.
Research scope
The research scope of the TSRC has evolved as the societal challenges associated with mobility have developed. Current research objectives of the Centre are as follows:
- To develop and evaluate new technology solutions to improve transport and mobility
- To ensure future vehicles and transport systems reduce traffic casualties and improve safety
- To assure the safety of partially and fully autonomous vehicles
- To develop and apply methods to support policymakers to optimise the societal impacts of future mobility systems
- To enable the deployment of future mobility systems by improving user acceptance and adoption of the technologies
- To be dynamically responsive to developing challenges in mobility (e.g. automation, electric vehicles, the ‘green/low carbon emissions’ agenda etc.)
The expertise of the Centre members has developed to meet these challenges and cover the broad themes of safety, human interactions and acceptance, societal impact and technology operability and deployment. Specifically, the competence areas cover: accident causation and analysis; road user behaviour; driver state monitoring – fatigue, distraction and cognitive workload; big data analysis including statistical and AI methods; impact of injury and epidemiological studies; traffic and vehicle microsimulation; HMI evaluations including human-robot interactions; policy support systems; and project management and delivery.
Current areas of expertise
- In-depth, multidisciplinary road accident investigation and data collection, specialising in highway, vehicle and human factors
- Analysis of large accident databases
- Design, management and execution of specialist accident data analyses, including cost-benefit studies
- Monitoring and advising on safety regulations, guidelines and policy
- Behaviour of drivers and other road-users
- Evaluating vehicle and component crashworthiness
- Human crash kinematics, injuries and biomechanics
- Management of large (national and international) data collection systems
- Naturalistic driving and Driver Field Trials
- Injury biomechanics and injury analysis
- Modelling and simulation
- Road user behaviour
- Human factors
- Vulnerable Road User research
- Driver impairment and fitness to drive
- Sleep shift-work and safety
Therefore, the TSRC has wide-ranging road safety and engineering related research expertise offered through collaborations with established external partnerships across Europe, and further afield, including: safety related highway infrastructure design; driver and rider vision, visibility, and vehicle conspicuity; signs and road marking; and traffic signals, pedestrian/cycle crossings, roundabouts and other junctions traffic calming schemes children and the vulnerable road users, including mobility and impairment issues.
